Beijing Letter: Since he uses a European name with his clients, let's call him James. He's in his mid-20s, speaks good English and has recently married a woman who works in the same business as he does: selling fakes. His workplace changes regularly, so his most important fixed asset is the mobile phone number, the best way to keep track of him.
His most recent showroom is in an anonymous 1980s office block on the southeastern side of Beijing, not far from the Pearl Market. You call the number and he gives you the address and floor number, along with instructions as to how to get there.
When you get out of the lift, you are facing a long corridor. It gives him a clear view of who's coming in, and it's long enough to provide some warning if the visitor is unwelcome.
When you hear his voice and follow it down the corridor, you come to a small suite of offices and a proper showroom, with a long glass case in the front and big glass cases behind.
They are filled with an impressive array of watches. All the major international brands are here, the Rolexes, Cartiers, Tag Heuers, Breitlings, IWCs, Omegas and Patek Philippes, each in a wide variety of styles. On the floor, there are boxes of Mont Blanc fountain pens.
None of them is real and James certainly doesn't pretend that they are. He is, in his own way, completely honest. He carefully explains to his customers what they're getting and if there's a problem with a watch he's sold, he'll fix it or give you a new one.
It was James who explained to me, when I went along to look at his operation, a crucial distinction: that between fake fakes and real fakes.
Fake fakes are cheap imitations of luxury goods, made with inferior materials and workmanship.
Real fakes are close in quality to the object being copied; the more you pay, the closer they get.
James sells both kinds, from a €10 Omega that looks like it's made of tin to a €20,000 Rolex made with real platinum and diamonds. One of James's European customers explained to me that he had spent a few hundred euros on one of his Rolexes (a tenth of what an authentic model would have cost) and it was so good that when he sent it to a real Rolex dealer to be cleaned a few years later, no one noticed that it was a fake.
This ability to make good copies of foreign goods is not accidental, because it has been going for a very long time. The 17th-century Dominican missionary Domingo Navarrete note: "The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation. They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe.
"In the Province of Canton they have counterfeited several things so exactly that they sell them inland for goods brought out from Europe."
Long before the notion of intellectual property rights was invented, Chinese merchants and manufacturers were using their skills to meet market demands for goods whose supposed origins gave them extra cachet. The exploitation of the magic of brand names may be reasonably new, but it is really only the development of an old habit.
The foreign companies who have spent fortunes building those brands complain bitterly, of course. In spite of ostentatious official crackdowns over the last two years, however, the complaints are largely ineffective.
The Chinese authorities trumpet their success in seizing 39 million fake products in the first half of this year, and there's no doubt that they're making an effort. But the total value of the goods seized - €6.8 million - is no more than a marginal loss in a much more vast business.
The American Chamber of Commerce in China reports that 55 per cent of its member companies have been negatively affected by piracy, while 41 per cent believe that the counterfeiting of their products actually increased last year.
There are some obvious reasons. Much of what counterfeiters do is not illegal: there is no law against bringing a camcorder into a cinema, for example, or against borrowing a print of a movie from a projectionist and copying it.
Even when the law is invoked, it's not always intimidating. Last September, Burberry, Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada jointly filed a lawsuit against the Silk Market in Beijing, which specialises in copies of their handbags. They won a landmark victory, but the court awarded them €10,000 in compensation - hardly a significant deterrent.
But the biggest reason for the likely failure of any crackdown is the most obvious one: demand - and an awful lot of the demand is not Chinese but Western. There is certainly a huge local market in fake Chinese products like medicated oils, while pirated DVDs and albums dominate the local movie and music markets.
Pirates of the Caribbean II has been on the streets here for a fortnight. The Da Vinci Code was on sale in pirated copies before it was released in Ireland.
Foreigners are the big market for watches and clothes and handbags. Rich Chinese people look down on fakes and want the real thing but for European and American ex-pats and tourists, there is a special glee in a €40 Hugo Boss jacket or a €15 pair of Ralph Lauren slacks.
It's not just that the real fakes can be rather good, well cut and made with materials similar to the original, it's also that the whole business of branding can be such a racket.
When so much of their stuff is made in China anyway, the imagery used by many of Western companies, who would have you believe that everything is hand-crafted by ancient members of Florentine guilds, has an obvious fakery to it too. This contributes to an atmosphere in which most people don't really think there's anything immoral about buying fakes.
I certainly haven't met any Westerners suffering from pangs of conscience. How many Beijing-based diplomats or business people, fresh from lecturing the Chinese about intellectual property, are waiting for a year to buy the latest series of The Sopranos for €80 from Amazon, when a perfect copy is available for €8 even before the series had finished on RTÉ?
Even trade negotiators can find the temptations irresistible: in 1998, the US trade representative Charlene Barshefsky arrived back from one of Bill Clinton's presidential visits to China with illegal Beanie Babies for her daughters. When we stop buying fakes, the Chinese will stop making them, but until then, why wear anything but Armani?
