Mao would be proud

BEIJING – There are many products for sale in China, but most of them can be summed up by this: It’s almost as good and a whole lot cheaper.

In fact, for a pittance, a person can adorn themselves with near-perfect copies of any status symbol they can imagine. And for that reason, some status symbols in China don’t mean much any more.

There are six-story malls, districts even, dedicated to providing wide-eyed tourists the chance to gorge themselves on everything from Ralph Lauren to Yves Saint Laurent.

And it isn’t just clothes that you can buy forgeries of; even some cars can be faked.

But here’s the problem: If it isn’t expensive, it isn’t elite. If it isn’t elite, it isn’t cool. And if it isn’t cool, it’s not worth buying.

Sure, piracy is technically illegal in China. But it’s illegal the same way that oral sex is illegal in Indiana. Moreover, the sale of forged items puts money into the hands of Chinese salespeople at the cost of companies based outside China, and it contributes to tourism. But China gains something entirely different – a slight revocation of what luxury items truly signify and a sort of belated, unintended field goal for egalitarianism.

On the streets of Beijing, no one wearing a Gucci sweater or checking a Rolex is perceived to be any better than the person next to him. While there certainly exist vast differences between levels of wealth in China, the aged comrades of a generation whose ideology is almost forgotten can at least take solace in the fact that outright class differentiation is getting harder and harder.

The default assumption following the end of the communist scare seemed to be that communism was defeated by merely the presence of capitalism, like darkness in a room obliterated by a candle.

Of course there’s no battle left to be fought (emigration to Venezuela and North Korea isn’t exactly booming), but it’s at least an interesting idea. Capitalism’s basic foundation is property rights, and forgery erodes this.

If one wanted to rid the world of status symbols, flooding the market with cheap status symbols would do two things: rob the good of any significance by making it easy to attain by even the poor and divert any profit that might have gone to the company that designed the good.

As long as carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag is seen as fashionable, people will try to get it for the cheapest price, until it’s seen as too common. Then, no one wants it at all. Governments protect against this through enforcing property rights, something China has had trouble with in recent years.

Of course, no reasonable person would believe there’s any government plot to undermine the fashion industry. Indeed, no reasonable person would believe that the

Chinese still want pure communism. But you have to admire how it all worked out – all the while, Marxists thought they could discourage materialism by shunning high-fashion items.

Who knew all the answers lay in giving Prada to the proletariat?