When the wind carried away the heavy, stale air of this city and the sun lifted my spirits, I decided to buy some shoes. Soccer shoes, to be sure. I needed them for today, for our formidable loss against a South-African team (0:6). Yaxiu market was the perfect place to buy them. Hundreds of little stalls packed with bags, clothing, shoes, and pretty much everything else that can be copied and worn. My shoes started at 600 yuan, I managed to haggle them down to 200. Still 100 too much, I was told later. Well, it was my first time at Yaxiu. So here we are, perfect Nike fake shoes. They do feel strange, but then, I merely spent 20 Euros.
Does a market like Yashuo hurt Nike? I think not. First, it is difficult to find original Nike shoes in ordinary stores. And then, if there are originals being sold, relatively few people could afford them. So, in the first place, fake Nike shoes target a market, that the company itself would not cater to anyways. But most importantly, fake Nike shoes actually secure Nike’s success in China in the future. For, the copy-culture in Beijing and elsewhere prepares the ’selling-ground’ for Nike by educating people its brand, its style, its design. At the moment the company does not yet benefit from this education. But in the long-term, it will. As mentioned earlier, a newly emerging middle-class can increasingly afford to spend more on ‘quality’-shoes. And quality is guaranteed by the original. Nike will in the future find a market ripe with people craving not just for shoes, not just for shoes with Nike on them, but shoes with Nike in them, original Nike products.
To understand why people turn to original products, despite their high prices, Thorstein Veblen’s work on conspicious consumption (Geltungskonsum) is informative. Veblen describes consumer society. The society in which everything can be bought, everything is a commodity, among other things, because it can be translated in a universal unit of measure and exchange–money. In this society the traditional lines among classes blur (Bourgeosie vs. Proletariat) and new lines of class- differentiation are being sought. Ultimately, these lines become defined by way of coupling consumption with representation.
“The basis on which good repute in any highly organised industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.” (Veblen 1902)
The consumption that is not directed toward a useful purpose other than that of that satisfying one’s (representative) status is conspicious. Conspicious consumption takes place, when people in China buy expensive French wine, eventhough their taste buds are not conditioned to actually distinguish good wine from bad wine (as we taste and judge wine, at least). Good wine is French and super-expensive–that’s the criteria. Air-conditioning is another example. Although it is obviously detrimental to the human-body to be freezing all the time, a really really cold appartment (with lots of air-cons and a high electricity bill) bespeaks of wealthiness, of the capacity to constantly ‘be cool’, as it were. There are many more cases of conspicious consumption in everyday-life in any modern society. But here in China, their contradictions become most apparent. In order to understand the changes in Chinese society today, consumption theory is important, probably more than any political theory.
I am indebted to Michael Ulfstjerne for bringing these themes to my attention.
