Ahmet Demirhan
The first possibility that comes to mind when one cannot imagine a Chinese typewriter, yet considers the possibility of its existence, is that if such a typewriter—one actually used by the Chinese—does exist, it might be a “counterfeit.” Here, “counterfeit” carries meanings beyond simply being a copy created by imitating an existing “original.” A “counterfeit” is, of course, an “imitation”; however, it is an “imitation” made without permission from the “original”—one might say, without “copyright”—and thus created without authorization.
The history of evaluating China as “counterfeit” is often associated with the invasion of Western markets by almost identical copies of original products. Yet perhaps its earlier background should also be investigated; however, even before “counterfeit” products flooded the markets, when one looks at the logic of the debates that took place on the eve of Hong Kong’s handover to China in assessments about China, it can be said that a “counterfeit” issue was already in effect. Around the 1990s, when I was still an undergraduate sociology student, that is, roughly a decade before Hong Kong’s handover to China, I realized—quite recently, in fact—that in a class whose name I can no longer recall, probably while discussing the transmissibility of modernity, our discussion of the consequences of Hong Kong’s transition from being a British colony to Chinese sovereignty was grounded in a “counterfeit”-based framework. Roughly speaking, the focus of the discussion was a kind of brainstorming centered on the possibility of whether, after the handover, China would influence and transform Hong Kong, or whether Hong Kong—which had long remained under British rule and thus had emerged as an example of British capitalism on the edge of the Chinese mainland—would instead transform China. To this debate, which also constitutes the main subject of the works of the China modernization expert Arif Dirlik, who passed away last year, it is now quite possible to respond by saying that China has in fact established “counterfeit” Hong Kongs in Beijing or Shanghai. However, this response cannot easily evolve into the possibility that Hong Kong has transformed China. That would amount to turning Hong Kong, in one way or another, into a miniature of an ancient China. At the level of discourse, the counterpart of this opposition is that, for the Chinese, Hong Kong is a corrupt representative of Western culture open to liberal free trade, whereas for Westerners it corresponds to a free trade zone that has never fully become Western and ultimately represents a conservative Chinese mainland—which, in the end, is akin to imagining a Chinese typewriter for a nation “without an alphabet.”
A reflection of this analogy is the effort to explain “counterfeit” together with a deeper and more traditional Chinese culture. For example, the work of Byung-Chul Han—who, for some reason, is very popular here (though do not take my saying “for some reason” at face value; his tendency to produce works on almost every subject as if they were pills perhaps reveals a kind of ease that could be evaluated under the heading of “counterfeit”)—titled Shanzai: Dekonstruktion auf Chinesisch, written in German on the notion of “counterfeit” in China, is translated into Turkish as Çakma: Çince Yapıbozum. In other words, in the translation, the expression “Shanzai,” which is actually present in the original, is not preserved, and through a “counterfeit” operation it is rendered as “Çakma.” Although this initially appears creative, the situation becomes even more complicated when, in the English translation of Han’s work, the expression “Shanzai” is preserved as it is, yet the word is translated as “fake.” As is well known, “fake” is a term with excessively negative—even malicious—connotations, used quite frequently especially in the media sector in Donald Trump’s country, and it is closer in meaning to “forgery.”
On the other hand, Han’s explanation of Shanzai is also complicated. It is as if, on the one hand, the effort to capture the original of a word in Chinese that means “counterfeit,” that is, to present what the original of the “counterfeit” is, and on the other hand, the attempt to reimagine a “counterfeit” that already has an original in Chinese under Western eyes, have made his analysis more complex. For this reason, he first offers an analysis of “counterfeit” for Western eyes and, in doing so, uses China as if it were an ethnographic field. Accordingly, “counterfeit” (or “fake”), Shanzhai (山寨) in Chinese, is a new or fabricated word (a neologism). In addition, it has a wide range of usage that can be expressed through terms such as “shanzhaism,” “shanzhai culture,” or the “shanzhai spirit.” Indeed, “Shanzhai has permeated every aspect of life in China today. There are shanzhai books, a shanzhai Nobel Prize, shanzhai films, shanzhai politicians, and shanzhai stars.”
However, according to Byung-Chul Han, the Chinese first encountered this newly coined term in the field of mobile phones. Accordingly, shanzhai mobile phones were used to refer to products that imitated brands such as Nokia or Samsung and were released under names like Nokir or Samsing. Nevertheless, Han draws attention to a point—one that he will later use not for Western eyes but as a basis to demonstrate the very essence of “counterfeit” in China: “Yet these cannot be regarded as crude forgeries.” On the one hand, shanzhai products “are by no means inferior to the original in terms of design and function. Technological and aesthetic modifications give them their own identity.” On the other hand, these products—which possess both “counterfeit” and “their own identity”—have a level of “flexibility” that goes far beyond even the originals they copy. Indeed, owing to this characteristic, they possess the capacity to respond immediately and swiftly to new and specific needs that original products cannot easily adapt to “over long production periods.” In other words, shanzhai products have qualities that surpass the originals they copy and fully exploit a potential. Han calls this a “true Chinese phenomenon” and believes that it represents China.
What is interesting is that these “counterfeit” products—which are in fact “fake”—also include applications that can, for example, immediately detect counterfeit money. For this reason, they possess “original” qualities. This aspect does not only involve the presence of certain applications or features in “counterfeit” products that are not found in original products and their easy and rapid integration into products; it also becomes the essential characteristic of a shanzhai product: “Shanzhai exhibits a distinctive form of creativity. Shanzhai products gradually diverge from their originals until they transform themselves into a distinctive creativity.” However, at this stage of conveying shanzhai to Western eyes, Han prefers to present this feature merely as a change of name: “Adidas becomes Adidos, Adadis, Adadas, Adis, Dasisa, and so on.” For this reason, Han sees the originality of such “counterfeit” products that copy the original as “a genuine Dadaist game that not only fosters creativity but also mockingly and destructively affects the positions of economic powers and monopolies” (pp. 79–80).
However, Han’s analysis suddenly changes direction at this stage. In a way that prompts one to question the authenticity of what he has said above and to ask whether they should be regarded as a “counterfeit” analysis, he turns to the original meaning in Chinese of shanzhai, which he had described as a neologism: “The literal meaning of shanzhai is ‘mountain fortress.’” Here too, Han makes an interesting move and first interprets the “mountain fortress” within a framework that mocks state power—one might say, forming a “true Dadaist game.” Accordingly, there is a famous novel called Water Margin (shui hu zhuan), and in this novel, which depicts the Song dynasty period, “outlaws (peasants, officials, merchants, fishermen, officers, and monks),” that is, nearly every segment of the population, hide in “a mountain fortress to fight against a corrupt regime.” Han first explains this situation within the context of “shanzhai culture”: “Even shanzhai examples on the internet that satirize state media controlled by the Party are interpreted as subversive acts targeting the monopoly over freedom of thought and representation.” However, he immediately abandons this explanation and claims that interpreting “shanzhai culture” in this way rests on the “hope that it could eliminate the power of state authority at the political level and release democratic energies.” Yet the fundamental characteristic of shanzhai is not an “anarchic-destructive” one, but rather a “playful-creative” character.
It is precisely here that we arrive at a clear understanding of what shanzhai actually means in China. Because the novel Water Margin is in fact authorless—that is, it has no author; it is anonymous. This does not mean that it is anonymous simply because its author is unknown. The novel’s mode of composition requires that its author be unknown. Because the novel, which has many different editions—say, one edition may contain 70 chapters while another contains 120—the stories in each chapter were written by different people, and the structure of the novel is thus formed both through editions containing variations in chapters and through the stories in each chapter being written by different individuals. This, in fact, is exactly what shanzhai is: “In China, cultural productions are generally not attributed to any specific individual. Most often, they have a collective origin and do not exhibit forms of expression associated with individual, creative genius.” Precisely for this reason, not only the novel Water Margin but also works such as Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Three Kingdoms have been rewritten time and again, and with each rewriting, the structure of the novel has changed. Indeed, while one version may end with a tragic ending, another version may easily end with a happy ending. This applies not only to classical works but also to the editions of Harry Potter published in China. In the Chinese editions, Harry Potter may acquire Chinese friends; he may speak Chinese with ease and eat with chopsticks.
Thus, Han establishes a principle for shanzhai. Although he offers an analysis that draws the reader into a whirlpool by first stating that the word is a neologism, then explaining that it contains a playful “destructive” act against authority found in classical literature, and finally asserting that it is in fact a method through which classical Chinese literature produces and even reproduces itself, he nevertheless states that shanzhai—which he defines as “counterfeit” (fake) and presents as a general characteristic of China—does not aim to “deliberately deceive” through either its commercial or literary “products”: “In reality, beneath their appeal lies the fact that they specifically draw attention to the truth that they are not original and that they play with the original work” (p. 81; translation slightly modified).
But if that is the case, shanzhai is not “counterfeit.” It is a distinctive (one might say) mode of production. Nevertheless, Byung-Chul Han, a writer from Seoul, Korea, who writes in German, finds this playful character inherently deconstructive: “Shanzhai’s game of fakery inherently produces deconstructive energies. Shanzhai label design also carries humorous traits. On a Shanzhai iPhone, the label looks as if it were a slightly worn iPhone label.” This, in turn, gives rise to a principle regarding shanzhai: shanzhai products, with their undeniable creativity and playfulness, are defined not by the rupture and suddenness of a new creation that severs its ties with the old, but by the playful pleasure found in modifying, diversifying, combining, and transforming the old. This, in fact, reveals another characteristic of shanzhai alongside its inherent or original “deconstructive” nature: the characteristic of “process and change.”
As can be understood, the “deconstructive” character here is not exactly the deconstructiveness associated with Derrida, who is known as the originator of deconstruction (because in China, deconstruction, by virtue of its spontaneous existence, predates even Derrida’s deconstruction). However, “process and change” belongs to another Western approach that seeks to understand Chinese thought as a process and change without a creator. The most distinguished example of this can be seen in François Jullien’s work Process or Creation? An Introduction to the Thought of Chinese Intellectuals, which has also been translated into Turkish. In other words, while the Korean Byung-Chul Han presents us with a Chinese “counterfeit,” he cannot refrain from connecting it to two different traditions in the West. Jullien’s evaluation of Chinese thought as a “process” that takes place solely through interaction with one another, without any essence, substance, origin, or core, may perhaps be addressed in a different context; however, it is in fact interesting to say that a method of reading pioneered by Derrida exists in China spontaneously or by nature, and this is, as we will briefly touch upon below, connected in some way to such a notion of “process.”
Of course, Derrida—known for being attentive to the conditions under which his own works emerge and to the “signature” affixed to them—developed this method (even if not in the same way as in the Chinese novel Water Margin) through various concepts he drew from a certain tradition; for example, in connection with the concept of destruction (Destruktion) that Heidegger employed in Being and Time in his attempt to dismantle Western metaphysics from within, on the basis of its own foundations, and to reach the origin of the question of Being. In other words, in Derrida’s deconstruction as well (not only Heidegger), there is a tradition extending from Plato to NATO. The only difference between this and the Chinese “process” and thus the logic of shanzhai—that is, the logic of the “counterfeit”—is that Derrida is engaged with a history of philosophy and, accordingly, with the philosophers who constitute this history, and that these philosophers are not anonymous or unknown.
Considering the historical emergence of deconstruction as a method of reading employed by Derrida, it may, in this respect, seem interesting to find an inherent deconstructive quality in Chinese “appropriation.” However, the fact that Han’s book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, which begins with Hegel and his reflections on China and the Chinese, ultimately concludes, in its final chapter on “shanzhai,” with a Hegelian act eliminates this interest. Han’s “shanzhai” is a Sinicized form of Hegelianism, because Han, who begins his book by referring to Hegel’s writings on the Chinese people’s propensity for “lying,” and who also notes that Hegel attributes this “great immorality”—that the Chinese have “gained a notorious reputation for deceit wherever they find an opportunity”—to the fact that their consciousness has been shaped by “pure Nothingness,” ultimately arrives at the same point by portraying a Chinese mode of thought that is not the creation (or, if one prefers, cautiously speaking, the genesis) of any such “process” that constantly modifies, composes, diversifies, alters, and transforms itself in relation to what precedes it, and that therefore has no “original,” and thus operates as an always deconstructive “process”: in fact, in Chinese thought, there is no “essence (ousia)” that is permanent and thus gives shape to the “process,” nor is there such an “essence” underlying all change and development within the “process” for the “process” to take shape in its image. For this reason, the “counterfeit,” while copying that which has an original, imitates it as though the original did not exist at all, and the “process” proceeds as if it were the Way (Dao). The trajectory of the spirit of that which has an “essence” is not the same as that of the spirit of that which does not have an “essence.” (As Han also emphasizes in his discussion of the Chinese term “zhen ji,” which, at least in the context of a work of art, means “original,” in connection with “truth,” in China “a work of art is empty and flat within itself. It is devoid of spirit and reality.” That is, it develops upon a “void” that lacks essence or substance.)
As can be understood, we have arrived at a point similar to that of the “non-alphabetic.” “Counterfeit” also suggests that there may be a Chinese-style logic of sequencing in China; while it involves the copying of a product that has an original in Western eyes, it can take shape as another kind of “process” within itself—a “process” in which that which has no original constantly modifies itself.
But what does the “counterfeit” of China deconstruct? We will address this in the next article while discussing the efforts to transition to an alphabet in “alphabet-less” China and the attempts to give a “voice” to “voiceless China.”