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Kevin McCullagh sees bling taking a back seat as the Chinese capital becomes more comfortable with its growing wealth. But in the back streets, bandit phonemakers are forging ahead with design

‘Beijing is so tidy and organised,’ gasps my Shanghainese interpreter, as we are whisked from the immense Capital Airport to our hotel, a block away from OMA’s forlorn-looking CCTV tower. As well as the adjacent Television Cultural Centre burning down during a firework display, the building has become the butt of much derision from the locals. In addition to being accident-prone, its expense and easiness on the eye have been called into question – by more than the local cab drivers.

As I would glean over the coming days, Beijingers have moved on from bathing in the reflected glory of Western starchitects. The success of the 2008 Olympics delivered national pride – in spades – and the ‘made in the West’ financial meltdown only further underlined the need for China to rethink what remains of its inferiority complex.

There’s a new cultural assuredness in the air. Beijing has always tended to shun the go-go flamboyance of southern cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong in the name of higher cultural and social concerns. As the seat of power, it tends to frown upon bravado, especially now that ‘bling’ is associated with

What particularly irks big brand manufacturers is that the Shanzhai versions often beats them to the market

Yanling Duan, a design magazine editor and TV show presenter, confirms that Chinese tastes are maturing and shifting towards a simpler aesthetic. However, she emphasises that, historically, they have tended towards softer French designs, rather than harder German modernism.

While the CCTV tower was commissioned in a more attention seeking era, the elite now looks to impress with understatement such as the recently completed ‘The Opposite House’. Kengo Kuma’s hotel sets a new benchmark in minimalux space and finishing, in a country that one jaded architect claims never finishes its buildings: ‘They never get much more than 90 per cent complete’.

That Kuma was commissioned at all reflects not just an assured shift to minimalism, but also a more subtle dynamic. Despite the resurgence of cultural nationalism and an architectural debate around the development of a contemporary Chinese vernacular, when push comes to shove the real aspiration is to have the best the world has to offer whether that be a Japanese architect, a German car or a Finnish phone.

German cars however can hold unexpected meanings. Audi, the epitome of restrained good taste, in the West, exudes power and status in China. The black Audi A6L is the politicians’ car. The ‘L’ stands for extended leg room, as big cheeses sit in back seats in this part of the world. This brand legacy dates back to the early nineties, when government officials were obliged to buy cars made in China; at the time, Audis were the best of the bunch.

While I fail to find an emergent Chinese aesthetic being forged by the design elite, I do find one in the back streets. At the bottom end of the market. Shanzhai (bandit) mobile phones are a distinctly Chinese phenomenon. These pirate phones began as simple knock-offs of popular handsets, with brand names such as Nckia, Sumsung and HiPhone, often selling for as little as $20 a piece. While features and interfaces are Inferior to mainstream models, in visual terms they are doppelgängers of the real thing. What particularly irks the big brand manufacturers is that the Shanzhai versions often beat them to market.

These makers of small phones, often run by just a handful of well connected staff in or around Shenzhen, have now started to add innovations. As well as reducing their size to fit local hands, new features like dual SIM-card slots that allow the phone to respond to two phone numbers are added. A personal favourite was the phone cum electric razor (pictured), a true Bodie and Doyle phone if ever The Professionals were to be resurrected as a 21st-century crime series.

This might prove to be a short lived burst of local design innovation, since recent reports suggest that sales have started to dip. Among Chines consumers, who will research a purchase for weeks, word has got around that the fakes are hard to use and break too easily.

I notice a less welcome innovation on the way across town for dinner. Our cab driver has strapped a video player over his rear view mirror and is taking in a movie, while ducking and weaving through rush hour traffic. As we pass the outsized portrait of Mao at the top of Tiananmen Square, my interpreter laughs: ‘This is the only place in China that reminds me that I live in a communist country.’

Who, here, is ripping off who?

Fear and loathing of China is ratcheting up in design land. But, says Kevin McCullagh, its boom is down to risk-taking and energy rather than ripping off Western ideas.

Becoming a workshop of the world was one thing, but China’s newfound status as the counterfeit capital of the world strikes designers closer to home.

After all, in our post-industrial knowledge economy we creatives are supposed to live on the thin air of ideas. Companies are also becoming more vigilant in protecting their ‘creative capital’. In defence of its ownership of Eames’ chair designs, Vitra used European copyright laws to force a Malaysian manufacturer to remove items similar to the Aluminium Chair from its stand at Orgatec.

Fakery has become a multi-billion dollar, globalised business, far beyond phoney Rolexes and Louis Vuittons. General Motors and Toyota have fought piracy cases in China involving whole cars, and the European Commission claims that counterfeit goods cost 100,000 European jobs a year. Two-thirds of counterfeits seized in Europe come from Asia, with the minority being of Chinese origin.

So should designers – who might have previously enjoyed the high-quality, but forbidden fakes of Shanghai’s Xiangyang market – begin to see cheap imitations in a more sinister light? Is a bit of harmless bargain hunting actually robbing designers of what is rightfully theirs? Are Chinese copycats stealing our jobs?

To take the issue seriously, we must untangle rights and cultural and economic factors. Let’s begin with the principle of intellectual property rights (IPR). The essence of copyright is the granting of a limited, state-enforced monopoly to protect innovators, so promoting innovation for the wider social good.

In a defining speech to the British Parliament in 1841, when the issue of copyright was being hammered out, Thomas Macaulay sharply defined the balance of interests: ‘It is good that authors should be remunerated and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly, yet monopoly is an evil for the sake of the good. We must submit to the evil, but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.’ Hold that thought – IPRs are a necessary evil, to be tolerated as long as they promote social progress through more innovation.

Let’s now bring to mind some real cultural differences. China is an industrial culture – making is a way of life for many Chinese. There are more mobile phone manufacturers in China than the rest of the world put together. By contrast, the West can be seen as a litigious society – if in doubt, sue. Business contract law is viewed as a Western concept in China, where guanxi – doing deals within a network of known associates – is traditionally the way business is done. Another pivotal difference is the contrasting attitudes to risk-taking. For the time and budget a Western company spends on an investment risk assessment, its Chinese counterpart will have tooled-up and have first production prototypes to assess.

Let’s also nail the myth that there is something innate to China about the counterfeiting boom. This condescending and self-aggrandising fiction used to be pitched at Japan in the Seventies, and Korea in the Nineties, before they went on to become industry leaders.

Copying is a well-rehearsed stage for developing economies. The Design Council’s director of design and innovation Richard Eiserman puts it succinctly: ‘It took Japan 30 years to catch-up, Korea 15 and China five’. So the counterfeit boom is the transitionary phase to China’s maturity as an innovation leader. And let’s not forget the unpaid copyright backlog in the other direction, when Enlightenment Europe was in catch-up mode – paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass are all Chinese inventions. As for Western jobs, it’s not a simple trade-off. In the past 20 years, as Europe de-industrialised, its workforce has grown by 20 per cent. Also, many companies only make their profits by sub-contracting manufacturing to China.

As more homegrown brands are developed there is increasing pressure from Chinese firms to see that IPR is enforced

Shanghai is now a global creative hub, and the number of Chinese mobile phone patents has tripled in the past three years. As more homegrown brands are developed and IP generated, there is increasing pressure from Chinese companies to see that IPR is enforced.

So how should we assess the ethics of buying copies? I suggest we follow Macaulay: is innovation and social progress served, or stifled? Ripping-off new designs from the Milan furniture fair is a different matter from reproducing a classic. In the first case, the innovator is robbed of their chance to earn a fair return on their investment. In the second, say when Vitra charge £1,100 for a piece designed 50 years ago, most of humanity is denied the chance to own a beautiful chair, decades after its innovator died. Who, here, is ripping off who?

I conclude that it’s international IP law that needs an overhaul, not China. China’s boom is not driven by cheap labour and ripping-off Western ideas, but by its energy, investment, and risk-taking. We should celebrate its awesome production potential to deliver great design to the masses, not call the lawyer.