While an anxious Queen Elizabeth and her brood were trying to ensure that Chinese President Xi Jinping and his stylish wife, Peng Liyuan, didn't like Buckingham Palace so much that they refused to abandon its splendours, the manager of a curio shop in Salzburg in Austria explained to me she didn't stock Chinese products. Indian housewives might rave over Chinese household gadgets and Hindu altars bristle Chinese-made deities, but she had deep suspicions about the "Made in China" label.
I first came across this misgiving in the island of Murano in the Venice archipelago. Hand-blown glass cufflinks were ^18 in one shop and only five in the next. You've guessed right. The latter were machine-made Chinese lookalikes. The better Venetian shops also flaunted "No Chinese goods" signs like the boutique in Salzburg I had entered looking for a similar pair of cufflinks for my son. Not only did I get them but there was a bonus - an elegantly scripted guarantee certificate that the cufflinks had been handmade by a glass master in Italy.
The certificate was in English too, unlike the "Made in Japan" signs in Japanese that appeared on traditional Irish souvenirs when Dublin insisted on a declaration of origin.
But no one could guarantee that the Chinese man, who tried to muscle into the ornate Diamond Jubilee Coach with Her Majesty and Xi in London, was an official interpreter and not a spy from Beijing. A not-dissimilar controversy erupted at Queen Victoria's coronation in 1837 when a mysterious Chinese in mandarin robe, pigtail and pillbox hat turned up at Westminster Abbey without an invitation. Fearing he might be the Son of Heaven's special envoy, the British seated him between a bishop and a duke. Chagrined to learn the next morning he was only the master of a humble junk anchored in the Thames in London's East End, they weren't taking any chances this time. Much to the annoyance of Xi's entourage, the intruder - spy or interpreter - was dragged off the Diamond Jubilee Coach. No one knows if the queen scolded the president about the incident, but he did fly off to Manchester.
But at least the British could rest assured that the royal coach, which took 10 years to build and cost £900,000, was genuine. It needn't have been. Nearly 5,000 miles east of London, a provincial Chinese called Bai Dijun apparently turns out similar coaches for a mere £4,000 a piece and in a matter of weeks. The diamonds and sapphires with which they are studded are not real; they don't include chips of Isaac Newton's apple tree or bits from Henry VIII's warship, the Mary Rose, like the original. But a cat may look at a queen, and there's nothing to stop rich Chinese people hiring the glittering equipage for an evening's outing. Who's to tell the difference between real and imitation at a time when right is wrong and crime masquerades as justice?
I am thinking of the four con artists in Heilongjiang province, who argued that if Xi could use his popular and highly publicised crackdown on corruption to crack down on possible rivals like Zhou Yongkang, the former security chief, why shouldn't they use it to make a little money? So, they spent four months to plan and build a £20,000-worth fake interrogation room complete with official-looking symbols, signage, certificates, computers, video cameras and handcuffs in an abandoned mall. It became the setting for blackmailing people, who had no means of knowing they were not in the hands of the law - apparently, genuine investigators don't behave very differently from criminals pretending to be law officers. Thanks to a sting operation, three of the four were caught after the rich head of a state-owned farm and his wife agreed to fork out £40,000 after a night-long interrogation, although protesting their innocence of corruption.
Remember that old gag about President Zail Singh being all trussed up for surgery in a US hospital? "Ready," asked the American nurse, to which an outraged Singh retorted: "Reddy no longer president. I am president!" A variant of that apocryphal tale was circulating in London when I flew in from Austria. "Who is the Chinese president," someone asked, seeing the flags along the mall and the crash barriers keeping the crowd at bay. "No, Hu was his predecessor. This is Xi," one of the rent-a-crowd cheerleaders that the Chinese embassy in the UK had mobilised to outnumber and out-chant the Free Tibet, Falun Gong and other dissident demonstrators explained.
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