Beijing vendors fight counterfeiting crackdown
BEIJING: Any tourist who has stepped foot in this city's famous Silk Street Market can testify that it is home to some of the wiliest, most tenacious vendors who ever tried to palm off a fake handbag on a naïve foreigner.
So when the market managers temporarily shut down 29 stalls over the past month for selling counterfeit goods, no one expected the merchants to acquiesce quietly to the loss of business.
"We expected trouble," said Zhao Tianying, a legal consultant with IntellecPro, a Beijing firm specializing in intellectual property rights, who represents five foreign luxury-brand manufacturers that have sued the market for trademark violations. "But we never imagined this."
The vendors have responded with the same ferocity with which they nail down a sale. Dozens of them have staged weekly protests against IntellecPro lawyers who are pursuing the trademark case, mocking them as bourgeois puppets of foreigners. The vendors confronted witnesses who provided evidence of trademark violations and filed a countersuit asserting that only the government can shutter a business.
A few characters scrawled in pencil on the wall outside IntellecPro's office sums up the vendors' message: "We want to eat!"
The skirmish between the crafty but mostly uneducated hawkers and five of the world's best known producers of designer goods is part of a much bigger fight over China's vast counterfeit industry. American movie, music and software companies alone estimate that Chinese pirated goods cost them more than $2 billion a year in sales.
Any successful product is likely to be illegally copied in China, warns the Web site of the American Embassy here. China's government has pledged to crack down, and it faces increasing pressure to show progress. But some doubt much will change until China graduates from manufacturing goods to designing them, and has more to lose than gain.
The Silk Street Market case suggests that change is slow and painful.
It has been four years since Burberry, Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Prada first sued the market's operator, the Beijing Silk Street Company, and individual vendors for trademark violations. Only now has the legal pressure produced tangible results.
As part of a court-mediated agreement, the market's managers agreed to punish offending vendors, shutting down six to eight at a time for up to a week. George Wang, the market's general manager, said the manufacturers threatened to renew their suit if sales of counterfeits were not curtailed in six months.
In response, dozens of vendors descended on IntellecPro's office on Feb. 4, occupying the reception area for hours while the police tried to mediate, said Zhao, the legal consultant. The next day, she said, they stormed past the receptionist, banged on the walls and swore at the staff. The firm's senior partner, Hu Qi, was afraid to go home and slept in a hotel for three nights.
Last Monday, more than 50 vendors showed up for the sixth protest. They waved signs and chanted slogans outside the firm's building while IntellecPro lawyers, with 12 hired guards on hand, had their lunch delivered.
"We are trying to run businesses here," said one 37-year-old vendor in a red coat, a fake Dolce & Gabbana handbag on her arm. "They don't have any proof." She refused to give her name, saying she already faced enough scrutiny.
Asked about her handbag, she insisted: "We don't read English. We don't know what the letters mean. We just think it is pretty."
Another vendor, 24, who gave her last name as He, said: "We want to be compensated for our losses. And we want a public apology."
Wang, the market's amiable, 43-year-old manager, said he was "stuck in a terrible position."
"The five brands are saying, 'You are not doing a good enough job in protecting our intellectual property rights,' " he said. "And the vendors are saying, 'You are going overboard in protecting intellectual property rights.' But hey, what can we do? We would rather be known in the world as going overboard than for not."
There is little risk of that now. Tourist guidebooks call the Silk Street Market, a seven-story glass box near Beijing's diplomatic quarter, one of China's most popular spots to buy cheap, good-quality imitations. With some 1,200 stalls, it attracts 15 million shoppers a year, two-thirds of them foreigners, Wang said.
In the noisy basement, hawkers of leather goods buttonhole passing foreigners, cajoling until all hope of a sale is lost. They chat easily in broken English and can assess a copy's quality in seconds; the best, rated "super-A," are almost indistinguishable from genuine products.
