Heng Zhi: Well, shanzhai is a phenomenon that emerged around the early 2000s. It began with knock-off mobile phones produced by unlicensed, unbranded small workshop manufacturers, mainly in the Shenzhen area in China. It gained popularity very quickly. This was largely due to affordability. These manufacturers didn’t have brands or licenses, and they didn’t deal with intellectual property rights. They reduced costs by avoiding administrative processes and patent applications. At the same time, they were able to adapt very quickly to consumer demand – primarily the needs of low-income consumers.

A key factor was a single-chip solution for mobile phones produced by a Taiwanese company MediaTek. This chip made integrating multiple functions possible – including camera, hardware components, and software – onto one platform. As a result, even manufacturers with limited technological expertise could produce feature-rich devices. This made shanzhai products extremely popular. They captured a significant market share by the late 2000s, some estimates suggest they held about 25% of the Chinese market.

However, by the late 2010s, shanzhai gradually faded out of sight. This was partly due to the rise of smartphones which required more advanced technologies, but also due to rising income in China which made branded phones affordable to consumers. In addition, major domestic brands like Huawei and Xiaomi adopted certain shanzhai functional principles – such as rapid iteration, responsiveness to users, and open or participatory approaches – while offering more reliable products.

From a cultural perspective, shanzhai literally means “mountain stronghold” or “mountain village.” The term originates from the Ming dynasty novel Water Margin, where it refers to bandits and outlaws operating outside state control. So from the beginning, it carried a strong sense of subversion and cultural resistance. However, by the mid-2010s, shanzhai was being gradually absorbed into the mainstream narrative promoted by the Chinese state.

HZ: You don’t hear the term as often anymore. But even today, copying plays a role in the Chinese market. If we talk about the Chinese speed of manufacturing or “Shenzhen speed,” which was often mentioned when I recently visited the city of Shenzhen in China. It’s partly driven by intense competition among manufacturers. They constantly learn and copy from each other. This internal dynamic contributes to China’s manufacturing strength and surplus.

Interestingly, while debates about creativity and copying seem to have become less prominent in the Global North, questions of copying and authenticity appear to be experiencing a revival in African studies and scholarship on the Global South, particularly in relation to material cultures shaped by pirated goods from China.

HZ: Yes, although shanzhai as a label is fading, its influence on creative processes in China remains significant. Shenzhen today is often compared to Silicon Valley – the “Silicon Valley of the East.” But I think there’s a fundamental difference between the two, especially in how creativity and design are understood.

In Silicon Valley, innovation is often imagined as something that happens in clean, controlled environments – designers working on expensive laptops in polished offices. In contrast, in Shenzhen, design is deeply integrated with manufacturing. It’s not separated from production – in fact, you could say it is manufacturing-led. From my experience in Shenzhen, designers work very closely with manufacturers. Some even describe it metaphorically: “Designers are so deeply embedded in the production process that they often spend half their time at the factory – sometimes even sleeping there.”

But let me give you an example. In Shenzhen I visited a local coffee capsule machine manufacturer. It’s both an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and an ODM (original design manufacturer). Today, it is one of the leading producers of coffee capsule machines worldwide, exporting to around 90 countries, including many in Africa and the Global South. Their first machine, which they also showed me, looked like a cheap copy of a Nespresso device. But over time, they’ve become a major player in the industry, operating at a high level alongside their Western competitors. In fact, at the time of my visit they were preparing the reception of a delegation from Nespresso for sharing insights and discussing technological developments. Apparently it was an “exchange visit”, as even leading brands like Nespresso are constantly afraid of missing disruptive changes or innovations – according to their Chinese counterpart.

So the relationship evolved – a cheap imitator of Nespresso has become a serious competitor and even a strategic partner at eye level. A key part of this development was to learn through copying and studying Western products in detail. In the R&D department I was shown a wall filled with disassembled coffee machines from around the world, which were used to improve their own designs.

HZ: I think it’s a gradual process. It goes back to the philosophical debate about invention versus imitation. It’s not as binary as people would think. To me, copy as a cultural space challenges the binary reading of design – the separation between creativity and imitation, head and hand, high and low, but also social and economic endeavours are put in question. By helping us arrive at a more nuanced and pluralistic understanding of design, shanzhai offers a great opportunity to go beyond the mainstream canonical narrative of design history.

Of course, companies would never openly say they are copying. For example, when I interviewed Xiaomi around 2012–2013 when I was conducting field research for my doctoral thesis, the chief designer of the company insisted that their work was 100% innovation, with no imitation or copying involved. But at the same time, Jonathan Ive from Apple publicly criticized Xiaomi for copying Apple’s designs, calling it “theft” and “lazy” rather than flattery. So there’s a clear gap between how companies present themselves and how others perceive them.

HZ: Chinese manufacturers have become key players, especially in African markets and across the Global South more broadly. They provide products in areas like telecommunications and energy, connecting off-grid and rural populations. These markets were traditionally considered unprofitable by Western companies because of low profit margins. But Chinese manufacturers benefited from what you could call the Shenzhen ethos – “design for the bottom by the bottom.” Shanzhai manufacturers were producing for the underprivileged groups within China, but today, many of these companies apply similar principles in the Global South.

Take mobile phones as an example. Early shanzhai phones became popular partly because of the 2-SIM card slots, allowing users to switch between two telecommunication companies, one offering better telephone, the other internet connection. Later, they also developed other kinds of functions; for example, a scanner for fake banknotes or a connection for the internet cable in Chinese hotels back in the day when we didn’t have wireless connection.

The main company which dominates the African mobile phone market today is a Chinese manufacturer called Transsion. In the West, the company is unknown, as it is for most Chinese consumers, but in Africa it has around 45% of the market share of the whole continent. One of the key features of their phones is precisely multi-SIM slots such as 4-SIM slots tailored specifically for local needs – the users are able to easily switch between different mobile plans and networks because many of them live across borders of different countries. But what also makes Transsion so popular are their extremely long battery life for areas with frequent blackouts, improved facial recognition for darker skin tones, and affordability – they specialise in making smart phones which cost from 50 to 100 US dollars. So there’s a clear link between how shanzhai manufacturers were designing for the bottom of the market in China and how they are doing it today in the Global South.

HZ: That’s actually my next step to do fieldwork in Africa. I would like to research the local reactions, but also resistance. What I do know is that an increasing number of Chinese companies are relocating manufacturing to Africa, partly due to lower labour costs, but also because of the tax advantages. If you import the parts from China you would have to pay quite a big share in taxes, and therefore it’s much cheaper to manufacture in Africa.

Many of these manufacturers work with the African wholesalers who serve as a kind of market researcher for the companies, but of course the final decision remains with the Chinese R&D teams. I asked one of the lead engineers of such an R&D team if they have thought about working with the local African designers and he said that they tried that, but the problem is that African designers don’t have sufficient insight in the supply chain, and therefore also not enough insight into the material costs, which is a problem because one of the biggest issues for these companies is to reduce costs. However, this seemingly pragmatic approach excludes African players from the design and innovation process and raises broader questions about power relations and cultural divides.

There are a lot of critical issues to discuss which aren’t directly connected to shanzhai or copying. For example, what happens to the facial recognition data collected by Transsion? The government of Shanghai announced the initiative of building the biggest database for dark skin faces. What are they planning to use this data for? That’s one of the critical questions to research.

HZ: Yes, there is definitely policy support encouraging Chinese companies to go out to compete and export to developing markets through design. For example, in 2021, the Chinese government introduced the “Go-out” design policy as part of its broader Belt and Road Initiative. Officially titled “Notice by 19 Ministries on Promoting the High-Quality Development of Overseas Design Consulting Services”, encouraging the joint outsourcing of design and manufacturing, and in 2022, the policy document “Opinions on Promoting the High-Quality Development of International Cultural Trade”, focusing on the expansion and upgrading of cultural and creative goods in international trade. 

Traditionally, technology transfer moved from industrialised countries like those in Europe and the United States to Asia – first to Japan and Singapore after World War II, then to China and other Asian countries. This technology transfer process mostly involved lower-end technologies.

But China today seems to be keeping both ends of the spectrum. It is developing high-end innovations like AI and humanoid robots, while also continuing to produce low-end goods such as clothing and basic consumer products. Due to large-scale automation, less manual labour is needed, which creates a surplus in manufacturing capacity. This is one of the reasons Chinese companies are expanding abroad, many of them targeting the low-end markets in the Global South.

HZ: As an explicit phenomenon, shanzhai is largely gone. One reason for its decline, as I said in the beginning, is that it was absorbed into the mainstream narrative by the government. The Chinese government was at some point talking about shanzhai at the National People’s Congress, framing it as a Chinese mode of innovation.

In the 2010s, the government heavily promoted creative industries, including design. Many state-sponsored platforms and spaces were created, but they needed content. As a result, a lot of Western objects, products and approaches were imported, but there was also a need to define something distinctly Chinese, something that could distinguish the Chinese dream from the American dream, and shanzhai became really useful.

Initially, and especially in the cultural sphere, shanzhai as a phenomenon was infused with a strong element of resistance, subculture, and even subversion against authority and government, but slowly as it was absorbed into the mainstream, that critical edge largely got lost. I would say design played a mediating role in this process, bridging the gap between the top and the bottom.

One illuminating moment was when the chief designer from a well-known Shanghai studio asked me, “Why not copy?” He argued that shanzhai based producers were actually doing better human-centred design because they were more closely connected to the needs of underprivileged users. For instance, he gave me the example of a mobile phone his studio designed with six loudspeakers which covered the entire back of the phone. It was designed for elderly people exercising in parks, as well as construction workers listening to music during breaks. The Shanghai designer said that academic designers like himself would rarely identify such needs in low income consumers, but shanzhai practices made these demands visible.

In that sense, design acted as a mediator, translating grassroots needs into mainstream production. Eventually, even major national brands began producing similar phones with loudspeakers. In that sense, design is not innocent.

HZ: Yes, they definitely still do. During my research in Shenzhen talking about the “Shenzhen speed”, a designer actually said that if you have a successful product – especially in home appliances – it quickly appears on platforms like Taobao, the Chinese Alibaba. And if it happens to be a good product, it will get copied by the competitors within a very short time frame. The Chinese manufacturers have a really short time slot, two to three months, to make their profit, until the other companies manage to develop the same tools to imitate and produce the same product. In Shenzhen this process is accelerated. Instead of traditional prototyping, companies release finished products quickly and let the market act as a testing ground. It’s rapid prototyping through finished products – the manufacturers basically let the product hit the market and let the market do the research and then improve the product afterwards. But of course, environmentally and for the climate, it’s a very irresponsible way to act.

In general, it’s a kind of love-hate relationship among Chinese design policymakers and designers when it comes to copying. I would say the barrier to talking about copying or learning, if you like, is relatively low. During the heyday of shanzhai, people would often ask “Why would you say copying? We’re learning!” So it’s a complex relationship also due to colonial history and that’s one aspect I am currently trying to cover in a journal article I am writing. So basically, the Chinese design history can be traced back to the mid-19th century with industrialisation, which for China was started by an external force – particularly because of the Opium War. At that point, the Chinese realised that they cannot continue doing things as they were used to. There was this famous Westernisation Movement, also known as the Self-Strengthening Movement. Its main slogan was “learn from the foreigners to gain command of them.” In this context, copying or learning wasn’t seen as something shameful. On the contrary, it was seen as an act of self-empowerment, even as a kind of decolonial strategy.