People, who buy conterfeit products knowingly, may not regret their purchases as much as the
ones who are deceived.

Fair comment. If a fake product is being sold as a genuine one, then the person responsible should be shot!

I guess it comes
down to which attitudes should be encouraged and which ones suppressed. But, yes, we
could leave it up to the future "Jack Ma Copycats" to decide and let the
global economy roll.

It's the 'attitude issue' that I disagree on. Let me explain why.

I used to have a little hobby-business. Customers would come to me with a particular product that they were buying on the local market and ask me to find them the same product, only cheaper.

Here's a simple example.

Fred owns a restaurant supply business. He sells around 10,000 sets of knives and forks per year, and he is buying these from his supplier for $5 per set.

Fred employs me to find the same sets, cheaper. So I later present Fred with 2 'copy' sets of knives and forks. One set is $1, the other is $3.

Now even by Chinese standards, there is a huge difference in quality between these 2 samples, but guess which one Fred wants to buy?

Despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, Fred insists on the $1 set because he is greedy. He cannot see the sense in saving $20,000 per year by buying the $3 product, when he can save $40,000 per year by buying the $1 product.

So Fred places an order for 10,000 sets. Six months down the track and Fred is on the phone calling me allsorts. His customers are complaining that these knives and forks are rubbish. They melt in the dishwasher and are becoming discoloured and tainted. But Fred blames anyone but himself.

Fred then has the attitude that everything coming out of China is cheap rubbish and should be avoided. Had Fred bought the $3 product, then he would more than likely still be doing so today.

Steve owned a tile warehouse. He was looking for some nice-looking porcelain tiles and asked for my assistance. When he realised what my fee was, he decided to save even more money and find them himself.

He contacted a Chinese factory and they sent him some samples. He was overjoyed and immediately placed an order for a 20-foot container of these wonderful tiles, at a cost of $30,000.

One day, while he was sitting in his office musing about how much money he had saved by doing everything himself instead of using my help, one of his installers came in with a terrible red rash on his lower arms. The installer had just finished laying a nice new floor of these wonderful porcelain tiles.

To cut a long story short, Steve's tiles contained asbestos. Illegal in Australia. The installer had suffered some kind of skin reaction to the asbestos when cutting and grinding the tiles.

So not only did Steve have to throw away his complete stock of tiles, he had to pay a small fortune for their disposal. My fee would have been nothing short of pennies by comparison. Steve has now joined the 'Chinese products are rubbish club'.

Whilst these 2 examples do not necessarily highlight the point you are making with regard to fake copies of well-known labels and brands, as long as there are people like Fred and Steve, Chinese factories are always going to be manufacturing fake goods - with or without Jack Ma.

The 'need-for-greed' is rife in thousands of industries across the globe. China is simply supplying a demand. We know it, the world knows it, Jack Ma has the balls to publicly say it.

Another driving force is peer-pressure. Apart from identification, another reason for school uniforms is so the poor-little-rich-kids cannot intimidate others by wearing the latest Armani suit to school. So they flash their wealth in other ways. Expensive golden training shoes and the latest I-phone for example.

What can an I-phone do that a Samsung or Huawei can't? (Siri question perhaps?). What makes an I-phone actually worth so much more than equally user-friendly phones that come without the ridiculous Apple price-tag? Nothing!

So why does it seem like 99% of students use an I-phone? Rhetorical question, right?

I have many grade 11 students, (or senior 2 if you prefer), who don't bring their phone to school any more for fear of being branded a leper, because their parents can't afford, (or won't buy them), an I-phone.

One final point. When a doctor in Australia prescribes medicine of some kind and we go to the pharmacy to buy it, the law states that where possible, the pharmacist must offer a cheaper alternative to the leading, or prescribed, brand. The alternative may not be a copy as such, because it is not sold as something dressed up the same as the leading brand, but nevertheless it plants a 'seed' in our minds that less expensive products save money whilst doing the same job.