China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Designing the antidote to counterfeit culture
Six university students from around China had the chance to apply their creativity by turning knockoff goods into other types of useful products at a competition held at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, as part of a novel program on how to dispose of seized fake products.
All the materials used by the students came from fake products amassed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, which organized the competition together with the China Youth Daily, China University Media Union and the Shanghaibased nonprofit organization Adream Foundation.
Since 2011, Alibaba has implemented spot checks on products sold on Taobao, the group’s online shopping portal, and initiated corresponding sanctions for retailers who were caught selling counterfeits. These products are sealed up and stored for three years to be used as evidence in potential lawsuits, and those remaining after this time are destroyed.
“The traditional way that knockoffs are destroyed is also a way of waste of resources, and this was the reason the competition fascinated me,” says Zhang Jin, a contestant and a first-year graduate student majoring in public art at Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, Gansu province.
“We tried to change these products by peeling off their fake exteriors, and transform them into real products and make full use of these materials.”
Sun Jungong, vice-president of Alibaba, says: “Fake goods are a kind of resources that are misplaced. Young people can give them another social value by repurposing counterfeit goods.”
Voted by teachers and students on the scene, Ayjol Adli, an ethnic Kazak and a native of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, won first prize with his creative work involving a pair of fake Nike sneakers.
He painted the shoes with patterns characteristic of his ethnic group, and used another fake Coach silk scarf to intensify its ethnic features. He says he cut the scarf into strips and glued them onto the front and sides of the shoes. He then shredded them with a knife to make them look and feel like fur.
“I also used the scarf to make the shoelaces in the form of a horsewhip. People from the Kazak ethnic group have a strong emotional connection with horses and grasslands, so I tried to blend these elements into my work,” says Adli, who is a sophomore majoring in dress design at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology.
Adli says he chose to work on shoes because there are still children in some parts of the world who don’t have shoes to keep their feet warm in winter.
“Although these shoes are