But Olympic items are another matter. They're all hidden away.
At one toy shop, the mention of the
"I'll give it to you for $45," he said of the men's timepiece, rubbing the black band to show that it was real leather. "Don't go. We can deal. I'll give you a cheaper price for two."
The Xinyang market (pronounced shin yahng) is keeping
In the last few years, Beijing has seized hundreds of thousands of fake Olympic items and toys, according to government and state media reports. Dozens of people have been prosecuted and fined well over $1 million. The Chinese government set up a hotline -- and is offering rewards of up to $14,700 -- for people to report counterfeiting of Olympic merchandise.
"I can feel that the crackdown effort this time is stronger and the scale larger," said Tao Xinliang, dean of Shanghai University's Intellectual Property School.
The government's aggressiveness is more than just a desire to clean up its image before the world. There's a lot of money at stake in the selling of licensed Olympic goods. As the host of the Games, Beijing stands to receive as much as 10% of the sales, expected to easily surpass the $61.5 million that the Athens Olympics in 2004 generated.
That's incentive for authorities to keep making the rounds at Xinyang -- and merchants to keep playing the cat-and-mouse game. Xinyang runs along tunnels that connect to a subway station, and vendors have back rooms or secret attics for hiding goods.
In one of several shops selling "
The merchant took out an oversized calculator and tapped his opening offer: $38 each. He soon lowered it to $30, 10 for $27 each.
"It's exactly like the real thing," he said, confiding that the pendant was smuggled from a factory near Hong Kong that produces silver necklaces. "We don't pay duties, so it's cheap. That's how it works in China. We have connections."
(Salespeople at an authentic Tiffany shop in Shanghai said they don't carry any Olympic necklaces.)
Nearby, a woman who gave her name as Lily was selling T-shirts with Billabong and
A few minutes later, a woman arrived toting a black garbage bag. Lily rifled through it and held up a white Adidas knit shirt. It had "Beijing 2008" and the Olympic rings embroidered under the left collar.
Looking up, she asked, "What size do you want?"
don.lee@latimes.com