Within 24 hours of the engagement of Prince William last month, Bruce Zhou was selling replicas of the famous Diana engagement ring on Alibaba.com for a few dollars each. The rings are made in Yiwu, capital of all that is cheap and trashy about Chinese exports. But in all their cubic zirconian splendour, these royal wedding replicas tell an important story about how China is haltingly moving away from a sweatshop past towards a more upmarket future. Beijing is working hard to shake off the image that the China price is always cut-price and nowhere more so than in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, where the 4m square metre Yiwu International Trade City has 62,000 shops selling 1.7m products at razor-thin profit margins. Yiwu is famous for trading the bulk of the world’s Christmas decorations – not to mention buttons and zips, hairbands and earrings by the million. But Fisher Sam of the Yiwu Unnar Jewellery Company, aims to make it famous for high-end royal wedding memorabilia. When he heard news of the engagement on the internet, he downloaded a picture of the famous Diana ring and immediately rushed hundreds of replicas into production, aiming for first-mover advantage. Although being far from the quality of the original, the reproductions are hardly the tuppenny trinkets westerners usually associate with China. With a 14-carat white gold-plated band, blue cubic zirconia stone and sparkling crystal setting, these rings sell overseas for $30 to $40.
Fisher, as he likes to be known, says he has already delivered 800 and aims to sell 50,000 – along with other royal replicas, such as Kate Middleton-inspired feather hairpieces, and small, Teletubbies-like figures bearing the faces of William and Kate. But the rings are his top product: he makes them for $2 each and sells them for $3-4 as part of a wholesale order – a profit margin of up to 100 per cent. With wages rising 20 per cent a year in Yiwu, the renminbi appreciating, raw material prices soaring and an acute shortage of migrant labourers, Fisher says he had no option but to go upmarket. “Competition in Yiwu is very fierce, you really have to make yourself more competitive by doing innovative things like this royal wedding line,” he says. But better quality, more market-responsive fakes are hardly Beijing’s only vision for the future. Jin Xufeng of Kingland International Transportation, a logistics services company in Yiwu, says the International Trade City, the world’s largest small goods market, aims for a more profound transformation: it wants some companies to stop exporting completely and focus on importing, to satisfy domestic demand. Yiwu market aims to quadruple the floorspace devoted to selling imported goods by early next year. It is all part of Beijing’s grand plan to stimulate China’s low domestic consumption and tackle internationally contentious trade surpluses such as the $22.9bn November surplus announced on Friday. If Beijing has its way, by the time Prince William’s younger brother Harry gets married, China will be in the running to design the royal engagement ring, not just copy it.