China Times 2009.02.21
By Zhang Xiaohong

Currently, the market is flooded with "brand-name phones" (internationally renowned brands), "white-label phones" (lesser-known self-created small brands), "shanzhai phones" (brandless phones that mimic the designs of famous brands), and "super brand-name phones" (like LG dressed in Prada or Samsung in Armani). Regardless of whether they are affordable, low-cost, cheap, or exorbitantly priced, they are all a "mixed bag" of "miscellaneous brands."

What does this mean? If we recall the analog mobile phones that dominated the 1980s, they were bulky and heavy, but a Motorola "Black Brick" was entirely Motorola's creation from top to bottom, from design to technological development—100% "purebred." You wouldn't find Nokia components inside a Motorola phone. However, in the rapid evolution of contemporary communication technology, not only has analog technology become obsolete, but the integrated production model has also vanished. As a result, brand-name and white-label phones might use the same set of chips, while brand-name and shanzhai phones could share the same camera, battery, or screen. The key issue lies in the disappearance of the "core technology" in phone production. In other words, the once-high "high-tech" barrier no longer exists. Producing shanzhai phones is now as simple as making counterfeit watches—just buy a chipset (with integrated motherboard and software), pair it with a battery and phone casing, and assembly is complete. Today's "flexible capitalism" emphasizes modular and assembly-based production, rendering the binary distinctions between original/copy, genuine/fake, and pearl/fish-eye utterly irrelevant. Brand-name, white-label, shanzhai, and super brand-name phones together form a "miscellaneous continuum" of technological products, all participating in varying degrees of assembly and integration.

Therefore, when faced with the latest wave of reports on shanzhai phones from mainland China, we need not take pride or feel ashamed that Taiwan's semiconductor industry is the "father of mainland shanzhai phones," nor should we immediately jump to a moral stance on protecting intellectual property rights to condemn them. Instead, we should seriously consider what the emergence of shanzhai phones conveys about late-stage global capitalism—what messages, characteristics, and symptoms? In fact, shanzhai phones tell us many things, some old, like the huge gap between production costs and selling prices that allows shanzhai to thrive, and some new, like a fresh sense of time and speed. Typically, when we discuss the sense of time and speed in phones, our thinking tends to focus on whether the design and features are trendy, whether the battery life is long, or if the internet speed is fast. But the rise of shanzhai phones reveals that a single phone can have 24 types of time and 32 types of speed. When everything can be disassembled and reassembled, changing colors without altering materials, or upgrading pixels without changing ringtones, using Brand A's casing with Brand B's touchscreen and Brand C's camera, the speed of "assembly" competes with the speed of "transformation." Speed is redefined from traditional comparisons of fast and slow into a process of differentiation, and the one who can make the most differentiated micro-adjustments is the fastest.

Only in this sense can we say that shanzhai phones are the fastest. Shanzhai phones not only slash the price of brand-name phones by a whole digit but also reduce the typical one-year cycle from R&D to market launch for brand-name phones to just one month. Moreover, they can offer various special features selected "à la carte," along with custom-ordered genuine chips and software.The consideration of this special feature has made knockoff phones the most "grassroots" mobile devices. Which international brand would thoughtfully consider the usage patterns of different regions and social classes? Yet, knockoff phones absolutely adapt to local conditions. For instance, the unique "Thunderous Roar" model of mainland knockoff phones, equipped with seven large speakers on the back, is designed specifically for farmers to place on the ridges of fields while they work. Mainland China leapfrogged over a century of Western telecommunications infrastructure in just ten years, directly entering the era of wireless mobile phones. An entire village might not have a single landline, yet every farmer could own a mobile phone. Brand-name phones, typically carried by urban white-collar workers, are completely incapable of handling such unique situations. But knockoff phones can, knockoff phones dare, and knockoff phones charge ahead.

This is not to say that the knockoff logic can counter the logic of capitalism, but rather that the knockoff logic is an intrinsic accelerated mutation of capitalist logic. No wonder knockoff phones always hit the market before the genuine ones, embodying the notion that "technology always stems from human needs" even more so than the originals.

(Author is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University)

Source: http:/ / tech. chinatimes. com/ 2……05% 20112009022100305,00. html