The ink was barely dry on the print runs of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when the Chinese began cranking out unauthorized, incredibly bizarre stories which illegally use J.K. Rowling's beloved characters.
The iterations of Potter fraud and imitation here are, in fact, so copious they must be peeled back layer by layer.
There are the books, like the phony seventh novel, that masquerade as works written by Ms. Rowling. There are the copies of the genuine items, in both English and Chinese, scanned, reprinted, bound and sold for a fraction of the authorized texts.
As in some other countries, there are the unauthorized translations of real Harry Potter books, as well as books published under the imprint of major Chinese publishing houses, about which the publishers themselves say they have no knowledge. And there are the novels by budding Chinese writers hoping to piggyback on the success of the series - sometimes only to have their fake Potters copied by underground publishers who, naturally, pay them no royalties.
No one can say with any certainty what the full tally is, but there are easily a dozen unauthorized Harry Potter titles on the market here already, and that is counting only bound versions that are sold on street corners and can even be found in school libraries. Still more versions exist online.
These include Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince, a creation whose name in Chinese closely
resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include
Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon, Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire, Harry Potter and the Young Heroes, Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon, and Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.
Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling's characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like Journey to the West.
Here, the global Harry Potter publishing phenomenon has mutated into something altogether Chinese: a combination of remarkable imagination and startling industriousness, all placed in the service of counterfeiting, literary fraud and copyright violation.
Wang Lili, editor of the China Braille Publishing House, which published Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll in 2002, one of the Chinese knockoffs, said: "We published the book out of a very common incentive. Harry Potter was so popular that we wanted to enjoy the fruits of its widely accepted publicity in China."
The attitude reflected in Ms. Wang's comment goes a long way toward explaining not only the explosion of unauthorized Harry Potter literature in China, but also the much larger problem of rampant piracy in China, where travelers can find six different knockoffs of Viagra, without prescription, on display at airport drugstores, and where bootleg DVDs, fake Picassos, and even near-identical copies of famous-brand automobiles are widely available.
A kung-fu fighting Harry Potter and the Big Funnel? It's enough to drive any author to drink. Or at least into the arms of a good international copyright lawyer.
