Faking China, Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and the Postsocialist State in Globalization

This dissertation examines the interactions between two socio-cultural objects, nation branding and counterfeit culture, to articulate the operation of China's postsocialist state in the first decade of the 21st century. Nation branding in this context refers to a stateinitiated campaign, "From Made in China to Created in China," which emerged not long after China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. This national policy intends to transform the nation's global profile from a manufacturer of global brands to a creator of the country's own brands. Counterfeit culture encompasses the transnational making, selling, copying, imitating and buying of unauthorized global brand-name and audio-visual products. It permeates a number of media sites and practices in post-WTO China, from the mass consumption of pirated DVDs of foreign films to Internet spoofs of state television shows, from the use of knockoff mobile phones by rural migrants to the reconstruction of an urban counterfeit bazaar as part of Beijing's city branding for the global event of the Olympics. My analyses engage several artifacts of counterfeit culture whose formations are dialectically entwined with nation branding. I argue that post-WTO China's state reconfiguration enacts the workings of globalization qua cultural imperialism. In conforming to the neoliberal logic of consumer citizenship, the global-national ideological formation that is nation branding fails to recognize the alternative, collectivizing vision presented in counterfeit culture. As such, nation branding manifests itself as a cultural counter-production; in claiming to produce culture, it depletes rather than generates cultural resources for the nation's citizenry.