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RE: Shanghai Soup Dumpling Wars //小笼包之战
"What should we eat in Shanghai? I'll check the guide."
"But I don't want somewhere touristy, let's ask the locals."
"Good idea, we'll try something more authentic and then blog/yelp about it."
"Ooh, I hope it gets picked up by a guide."
The commodification of 'authentic culture' (which is really just daily life to those living it) is a real tricky thing. Even the most seemingly innocuous steps of a local market product entering the global market will drastically transform the nature of it... thus contradicting the original desire to trace out 'the authentic.'
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Right, there is an inherent contradiction in taking the "authentic" and leveraging it to drive expansion beyond the local. The trend in China is to invest/acquire foreign brands, with billions invested in German and Italian brands. The benefit is that Chinese firms can gain advanced technical expertise and brand heritage, while bringing down costs (especially for goods like cars and even pianos), but of course this also can produce anxiety for those that feel China is taking over their national industries. So companies are incentivized to promote the European heritage while "modernizing" the actual heritage of production.
Again, I think both can co-exist; just as we can have the "original" Din Tai Fung with its department store version, a piano maker can have its German-made version as well as the Chinese version. For example, New Balance segments their shoes, with 25% made in USA (and marketed as maintaining that heritage) while the rest are made overseas and sold at lower prices.