I recently dealt with two electronics markets in Beijing: the cleverly named "Buy Now" (百闹) computer mall, whose name means "100 Computers" in Chinese (literally "100 brains", because the word for computer is "electric brain"); and the 2nd-hand appliance market, where every type of machine from the Atari onward rests in various states of assembly and disrepair. My goal was to obtain a replacement power cord for my Apple iBook G4 at a reasonable price. In the end, it turned out to be cheaper and more convenient to wait for my mother to send the replacement part from the States and to purchase a tiny little used laptop to hold me over until my Apple is functional again.
How could this be, you might be wondering? After all, these things are all made in China, right? Plus, one look around at the uber-connected Chinese youth (and older people too - even peasants use SMS text messaging), and you know there is no shortage of mobile, wireless, and other computing technology in country. But "Made in China" is not the same as available in China, and the brand name you see is not necessarily the brand name you get.
Most of my belongings are part of a free-trade life cycle: they were produced in China and sent to the US, and now they have returned here with me. But unlike immigrants, these goods likely never saw the light of day in their home country. Most goods for export are sent directly from production to shipping and stop only for customs inspection before heading overseas. Despite what vendors might say, the ubiquitous, inexpensive look-alikes of famous Western brands here are rarely, if ever, over-runs, mistakes, or genuine goods authorized for sale on the local market. They are usually completely counterfeit knock-offs, local products with a recognizeable brand's label slapped on. Those that are not entirely fake night be unauthorized runs made at the real factory with some of the real materials purchased under the table from a real supplier.
If you want to buy the real product, you can get it, but not cheaply - it's been exported and re-imported, so your price tag includes two directions of shipping and two countries' customs duties. And if you're not absolutely sure you're buying a genuine product, you'll always have the nagging feeling you paid a fortune for something that's only worth a few dollars. That was my experience searching for my power cord at Buy Now. Last week, I bought a power cord at an Apple Authorized Reseller stall there - one of only a handful of Apple stalls in a sea of HP, Dell, IBM, Canon, and local knockoffs of the same. I had to bargain hard to get the price down to almost $100 USD, still more than the $80 price on the Apple web site. I needed the cord, though, and I was willing to pay for a product I knew was genuine. You can imagine my frustration, then, when the precious power cord, worth more than I usually spend on a pair of nice shoes, broke within a week of purchase.
I returned to the stall and was told they would sell me a replacement for the same price. But why should I have to pay, I asked, when it's clearly a problem with your product? Since I hadn't specifically negotiated a guarantee at the time of purchase, I was out of luck on that front. This time, I insisted on one-year guarantee. "No possibility! 不可能！" I was told, "This product can only be guaranteed for three months." I happen to have learned from the Apple web site their products are guaranteed for a year, so I fought.
Eventually, the sales manager came back with the following solution, "This can be guaranteed only for 3 months, but we have a better one that can be guaranteed for a year, which is a bit more expensive." By a "bit" more expensive, he meant over twice the price. I hit the roof. I know there is "no possibility" that Apple makes two versions of an accessory, a still-not-so-cheap one that will break in three months and a ridiculously expensive one that will break in a year. The vendor explained that one was domestically produced, and one was "original," and of course the one I had bought the week before was domestic.
I have no idea whether the power cord I had previously purchased from them was a "domestically-produced" Apple product, a used item that had just reached the end of its lifespan, or a fake. The stall does carry genuine new Apple products, but that doesn't mean they don't deal other stuff on the side as well. All I knew for sure was, there was no way I wanted to pay these guys another $200 or more for a possibly unreliable version of an $80 product. What else could I do, though? Hardly anyone in mainland China uses Apple computers, and this was pretty much the only place in Beijing to buy accessories for them.
Possibly sensing impeding meltdown of my own not-so-electronic brain, my friend Mark offered a suggestion: what about the second-hand appliance market? You could buy a cheap computer to hold you over for the three weeks until you get the power cord from the States (Mark had recently done such a thing himself).
I had been to that market once before, to purchase a cell phone for a friend who didn’t speak much Chinese. On that visit, I learned that 2nd-hand was sort of a misnomer – there were plenty of brand new cell phones and other electronics to be had. When I asked one vendor if his phones were so inexpensive because they were second-hand, he looked affronted, "I wouldn’t sell you a used product!" he exclaimed with pride, "It’s 水货 'water goods'! Quality guaranteed."
"Water goods" means smuggled goods, which slip into the country over water without stopping at the ports, or looking at it another way, flow through every corner of the country like water. There is virtually no social stigma against owning smuggled goods, any more than fakes. Another time, my hairdresser commented that the price I spent on my own cell phone was so cheap, it must be smuggled. "No way! I cried, I bought it at the China Mobile store, I wouldn’t mess with smuggled goods!" He looked surprised at my outburst and grumbled, "Well, it was a good bargain anyway."
I don’t have to get into the many reasons reasonable foreigners, especially diplomats, would want to avoid purchasing smuggled goods or counterfeits. The thing is, in many cases, illegitimate is the only option. The water goods, along with their their counterfeit and pirated brethren, flood the market so thoroughly, they drown any legal, genuine products. Frugal, recently-risen-to-middle-class consumers easily become accustomed to the products and low prices, making it extraordinarily difficult for the legitimate producer, who invested heavily in research to develop the product, to compete and turn a profit.
One US movie company, for example, opened a store in Beijing selling DVDs for around $2, almost the same as a DVD on the street, specifically to encourage Chinese shoppers to buy the real thing. But even at the same price, the genuine DVDs were not worth the effort to walk past dozens of guys selling high-quality pirated movie, software, and music DVDs from all brands and all countries, just to go to a store that sold only one label of American movies. I understand the store has since closed.
On this visit to the second-hand appliance market, I took care to browse at only stalls with old, beat-up looking products, both because I wanted something cheap and because I wanted to make sure I was getting truly a second-hand, not smuggled or pirated, product.
I doubted it would be worth the time and money to get an additional computer instead of a power cord. The idea sounded so ridiculous and wasteful, there must be a Chinese four-character idiom to describe it. But it turned out not to be that ridiculous at all. After less than a half hour of looking, I found a slim, light, mini-laptop for the same price as the 3-month guarantee power cord at the Apple Reseller. It was fairly old, and pretty basic, but it can do what I need – word processing in Chinese and English, and of course wireless and DSL internet access. I noticed it had Windows ME and asked why it didn’t have Windows XP as the sticker in it indicated. "Oh, ignore that, I just put it there to make it sell better," said the vendor. Well, at least he’s honest – sort of.
So I am blogging at this very moment from my new gadget, no match for my beloved iBook G4, but certainly functional. I researched the model and found it was originally made strictly for the Japanese market, it’s pretty old, and the operating system cannot be changed from Asian languages to English, all of which makes me feel like the price I paid was about right. If I were a Japanese person buying this new several years ago, this would have been a pretty hot item. Now, it simply fills my requirements: genuine, not smuggled, and capable of going online.
