APRIL 2007
Shopping Shenzhen style
Companies losing millions of dollars to makers of fakes want consumers to understand that counterfeiting harms legitimate businesses, exploits workers and is often run by criminal gangs with murky links to terrorism. So why do people still buy knock-offs? Peter Ollier took the short journey from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to see how the counterfeit buyers justify their purchases
To many people in China, Shenzhen is a city of opportunity. Little more than a quiet fishing village for much of the twentieth century, Shenzhen became one of China's first Special Economic Zones (SEZ) when Deng Xiaoping decided that it should experiment with "Socialism with Chinese characteristics". It now has a population of 6 million.
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