In Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei market in the 2010s, you could find dozens of phones with names and forms that unmistakably echoed the iPhone, lined up in stall after stall across multi-storey malls. They borrowed the iPhone’s name, shape, and aura, but they could do things the original could not: hold multiple SIM cards, play Adobe Flash video, and use a replaceable battery. To most outsiders, these were fakes. To the people who made and sold them, they were something else entirely. They called them shanzhai.

I spent years researching these phones and the manufacturing cultures behind them. What I found was not only counterfeiting, but also constraint, improvisation, and adaptation. From Hong Kong’s hidden factories in the 1950s and 1960s to Shenzhen’s markets in the 2000s and 2010s, shanzhai has never been just about deception, it has also been about possibility—how to make things work outside official rules, using whatever is at hand. What follows is an attempt to sit with that complexity rather than resolve it.

Shanzhai has a bad name: imitative, cheaply-made, deceptive. A different picture emerges, however, when you spend time with the people who make and sell these products. Shanzhai operates as a kind of paradigm: a way of thinking and doing things with its own logic and worldview.

The term shanzhai literally means ‘mountain stronghold’, and is often associated with the outlaw strongholds of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin. It signals resourcefulness, rebellion, and the ingenuity of working outside official channels. In modern usage, that association with informality and resourcefulness took on a new industrial meaning. Long before the term became attached to mobile phones in Shenzhen, it described small, informal workshops in Hong Kong. In the 1950s and 1960s, shanzhai factories operated in the backstreets of Kowloon and even inside the Kowloon Walled City, producing everything from fish balls to plastic toys, often without proper licences. These were survival economies, operating outside regulation but fuelling growth and ingenuity.

In the 2000s and 2010s, shanzhai became a phenomenon in China’s manufacturing boom. If you walked through Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei market and you would have found phones branded ‘Nokir’ or ‘iPone’, playful riffs on global icons. Unlike counterfeit handbags, which in China are usually called gaofang (‘high resemblance’), a shanzhai phone was not simply a cheaper copy of the original. It was often a departure from it—modified, adapted, and expanded to serve needs the original never anticipated.

So, what is shanzhai? It is counterfeiting, but it is also something more. Shanzhai names a process that starts with imitation, then moves through divergence, localisation, and mutation to fit new needs. It is this ambiguity, the fact that it cannot be reduced to either fakery or innovation, that makes it analytically interesting. As one Shenzhen entrepreneur put it bluntly: ‘Are they still imitations? We make them better than the original.’

Shanzhai is not innocent. Its very discomfort is what makes it revealing.

In design and legal discourse shaped by intellectual property law, copying is equated with theft with the assumption being that originality belongs to an individual author or company. When people see an ‘iPone’ or a ‘Nokir’ handset, the reflex is to assume fakery, but that reflex flattens something more complicated.

While shanzhai often exploits brand recognition, ambiguity is part of its power. It thrives in the gap between imitation and invention, where legality, ethics, and creativity intertwined. An ‘iPone’ borrowed Apple’s brand awareness while undercutting its prices, but this was not mere forgery. For small makers shut out of established channels, brand proximity became a way to enter markets closed to them, becoming a shortcut in environments saturated with unknown products. It signalled accessibility and familiarity, even as the devices themselves were already drifting away from the originals in function and audience.

In Chinese artistic traditions, copying has often been treated not as the opposite of creativity but as one path toward it. In the Tang dynasty, for example, the imperial court commissioned replicas of Wang Xizhi’s Lanting Xu. While the original calligraphic work has been lost for centuries, students of calligraphy have continued to learn from copies and copies of the copies. Without imitation, there would be no transmission. To copy a master was not to steal from them but to honour them through an act of deep study that carried their work forward. Chinese tradition recognised distinct modes of copying, from exact replication aimed at preservation to freer interpretations that sought to capture an original’s spirit while departing from it creatively. Western academies and ateliers also trained students through copying, but modern design and legal discourse have tended to place greater emphasis on originality and proprietary ownership.

This interplay is also visible in Chinese aesthetic tradition, where what matters is not just surface likeness but the ability to capture the spirit. The Ming scholar Zhao Yiguang once put it plainly: ‘First aim for exactness, then seek beauty.’ Exactness was only a step toward transformation. You can see this in Dong Qichang’s Landscape in the Style of Various Masters; Dong didn’t just reproduce old models but reimagined how earlier masters might have painted new scenes. It was copying as invention. The twentieth-century painter Zhang Daqian pushed this ambiguity further still; celebrated as one of the greatest modern Chinese painters, he was also a prolific imitator—some would argue ‘forger’—whose imitations of earlier masters were so accomplished that some entered museum collections as originals.

This does not mean shanzhai can be explained by cultural tradition alone. It was produced by very modern conditions: global supply chains, uneven regulation, low-cost manufacturing, open component markets, and intense entrepreneurial pressure. But it also resonates with older Chinese practices in which copying could function as training, transmission, and transformation. When shanzhai phones add features the original never offered, they are not simply counterfeits, but neither are they free from imitation’s ethical entanglements.

At the heart of shanzhai was an ecosystem consisting of a dense cluster of parts suppliers, small workshops, and design hacks in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei district. Together, they generated phones that at first glance looked like knock-offs but in practice offered features global brands had overlooked, such as multiple SIM slots for cross-border workers juggling different numbers or oversized batteries for regions with unreliable electricity. These improvisations were not accidents as they emerged from constant circulation and rapid experimentation.

This ecosystem ran on speed and recombination. MediaTek’s turnkey mobile-phone solutions lowered the barrier to entry, allowing small factories to assemble working phones without building proprietary R&D systems from scratch. Shared gongban board designs and casing moulds circulated through markets and QQ^[1] groups. If one workshop introduced an attachable flashlight or a UV detector for fake bills, sellers in Huaqiangbei stocked it within days, and dozens of assemblers folded it into new models within weeks. Knowledge spread horizontally through proximity, not permission.

What becomes visible through shanzhai is that innovation is not always the work of a lone genius in a garage or a guarded R&D lab. It is often collective, messy, and distributed across a network of tinkerers and suppliers. Ecosystems, not individuals, make technology move.

Shanzhai is not a marginal curiosity but a window onto how innovation happens. Every breakthrough builds on prior parts, borrowed knowledge, and incremental improvements. Shanzhai simply makes this process visible and harder to ignore.

Is shanzhai dead? People often assume that shanzhai was just a transitional phase consisting of cheap copies until ‘real’ Chinese innovation emerged with companies like Huawei and Xiaomi. But shanzhai didn’t disappear, it evolved.

During my fieldwork in Shenzhen, I met an entrepreneur, whom we will call Mr. Wang, a pseudonym used to protect his identity. Wang had grown up poor in a rural village, walking two hours each way to school before eventually making it to university. He and his wife moved to Shenzhen just as the city was booming. In the 2010s, he was making shanzhai phones. ‘It was quick money,’ he told me, and at his peak, he was selling tens of thousands of units a year. The economic logic was clear: copying was faster and cheaper than developing from scratch, and the margins were good. But profit alone does not explain why these devices diverged from the originals they imitated, adding features no brand-name phone offered.

Over time, Wang moved into new fields: smart home devices, bike-sharing payment systems, and AI-powered translation tools. Looking back, he told me that the years in the shanzhai phone business laid the foundation for everything that came after. ‘We had to start by copying,’ he explained. ‘But copying taught us how things worked.’

This improvisational economy thrived in what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai called the uneven, disjunctive landscape of globalisation: a world where capital, technology, regulation, and aspiration do not move at the same speed. Ingenuity and illegality were two sides of the same system.

The forms have changed, and the grey markets are less visible, but the logic—fast iteration, creative adaptation, working outside official playbooks—still circulates. Shanzhai is not a relic of the past; its logic migrated into China’s mainstream tech culture. Whether this represents something genuinely new or a continuation of the longer Chinese tradition of creative emulation is an open question. The tools have changed, but the underlying impulse to start from what exists and adapt it to what is needed has deep roots.

As Mr Wang said: ‘Without shanzhai, there would be no tech boom in China.’

A useful analogy for the shanzhai approach comes from Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak Airport. For decades, planes approaching the runway had to navigate around a hill through Kowloon’s dense urban landscape. A giant red-and-white checkerboard painted on the hillside became a visual marker: pilots flew toward what looked like an obstacle, then made the famous sharp right turn toward the runway. The hill was not removed. It was folded into the procedure. The obstacle became a guide.

When I described this story to my shanzhai manufacturer friends in China, they often laughed and said that’s exactly the shanzhai spirit. They saw themselves doing something similar: turning obstacles into guidance and constraints into creative prompts. Shanzhai makers did not have unlimited budgets, streamlined supply chains, or stable infrastructures. They had to improvise with what was at hand. For these makers, limits were not barriers but invitations to improvise.

In shanzhai, authorship is collective rather than singular. Breakthroughs emerge from networks of suppliers, coders, assemblers, and users who constantly test and tweak. The ‘original’ is less important than the ecosystem that sustains adaptation.

While this does not excuse the harms of grey markets with their unregulated products, IP violations, and exploitative labour, the point is not to celebrate or condemn shanzhai prematurely. It is to recognise how innovation often happens in friction zones, in the gaps between the formal and the informal, the legal and the not-quite-legal. That’s where design improvises and often where it surprises.

Beneath the gadgets and markets, shanzhai is also a human story. On the surface, it’s about technology and commerce. But once you spend time with the people making these devices, you realise it is also about ambition, survival, and resourcefulness in the fast-moving world of China’s reform-and-opening era.

I went into the field expecting to study counterfeit phones. What I found was that too, but also a window into how ordinary entrepreneurs navigated the uncertainties and opportunities brought by globalisation: copying not as a lack of imagination, but as a strategy for moving forward when rules were unclear and resources scarce. Whether we find that admirable or troubling says as much about our own assumptions as it does about shanzhai.

In this sense, it recalls Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas: finding design lessons in the vernacular rather than the formal. Shanzhai asks the same question of technology: What can we learn when the obstacle becomes the method?