China has moved beyond pirated DVDs into fake museum relics, fake officials and even fake zoo animals.
When it comes to fake goods, not many countries can match the reputation of China. In the past, the country has been a source for fake luxury goods, pirated DVDs, imitation cigarettes – all the usual stuff – but recently the fakes have taken a new turn.
First there was news that a museum in Jizhou had 40,000 fake relics in its collection. The counterfeits came to light when someone noticed that the artifacts, which were supposed to date back 4000 years to the Yellow Emperor, were inscribed with Simplified Chinese characters which came into use only in the 20th century.
A photo even showed a distinctly contemporary smiley-faced octopus looking creature on one of the thousand-year old vases, more proof of the scam. Either that, or the Chinese invented emoticons thousands of years ago :o).
Some of the artifacts were purchased for as little as 60 ringgit! Which really makes me sad, if you’re going to buy fakes to pass off as ancient relics, they could have put their hearts into it and spent just a little more. Or at least ensured that modern writing and emoticons weren’t covering their pieces. You really get what you pay for, especially with fakes.
Not surprisingly the museum has since shut it’s doors. Bogus exhibitions at a museum are definitely different, but at the end of the day it’s still just faked goods. China has even faked foods before, remember when it came out that a producer there was adding a resin-plastic to their rice and shipping it all over the place? Yep, replica rice, China is blasting through barriers and bringing the imitation of things to a whole other level.
Take the news about phony government officials. That’s right, anyone can fake handbags and put plastic into food, but it takes real chutzpah to impersonate a government official. The Washington Post found that “over 100 fake organizations were fronts for groups of fake government officials and scam artists”.
Apparently, these fake officials demanded bribes or special treatment for favours that they seldom delivered on. Though that didn’t stop people from trusting in them due to the “Chinese traditional culture” of trusting in government officials. Since very little is known about real Chinese officials, from family members to actual wealth, this veil of secrecy makes it difficult to doubt anyone’s claims, which inadvertently aids these fakes.
By all accounts the false officials were as tough to spot a well-faked handbag. One such pseudo official had “the swagger” of a real official but the devil’s in the details, like cruising around the city in a Mercedes Benz and, at the age of 50, keeping an 18-year old mistress. Yep, that’s dedication to his craft of fake officiating. Keeping up with an 18-year old at 50 has got to be tough.
Good fakes aren’t news in China. A few years ago 22 counterfeit Apple stores were found in Kunming. The fake Apple stores were done so well that even the staff thought they were working in a real Apple store. That’s some good faking.
But the news out of China this week is about some extremely bad shams that have gone to a whole new level. In the city of Luohe, a Chinese zoo is accused of trying to pass off a Tibetan mastiff as an African Lion. Yes, the Tibetan mastiff is a large (though still not large enough to be a lion) and rather fluffy dog, a fluffiness that possibly could be confused as a lion’s mane by a group of near-sighted visitors who had had their glasses knocked off, but it was the barking that really sold them out.
A visitor was taking her son around the zoo, pointing out the noises the various animals make, but when they got to the lions cage, instead of hearing a roar they heard a ruff.
Not to be outdone, the faking of animals went even deeper at the zoo, where they tried to pass off another dog as a wolf and a fox as a leopard – I suppose they were betting on people never having seen a leopard in person before. As for seeing wildlife on TV, maybe the staff were hoping they could use the “camera adds ten pounds” factor to explain the differences. Like the camera adds 200 kilos, and stripes, and colour, and sometimes roaring too.
I have no idea how the zoo, or the museum, or false officials thought they could get away with all this. Actually it’s quite sad when I think of this bogus bunch and how the fraudulent government officials seem to be the most credible of the lot. The tradition of fakes has bred a deep mistrust of stuff from China.
In a recent trip there, a colleague advised me to take a bottle of water with a blue label rather than a red one. The bottle with the red label “had cost one yuan (RM0.54) per bottle, much too cheap”, he said, and he believed that the water had probably come from a tap.
I drank from the other bottle and asked how much it had cost. He replied: “Two yuan (RM1.08)”. I gulped it down, resigned to the fact that I too was likely drinking only bottled tap water.
In the land of fakes, there was little point hoping for something real, I just hoped it wouldn’t kill me.
Counterfeit country | The Star Online
