Shoppers at the new Silk Alley Plaza know that the 200 yuan North Face jackets they are buying are pirated.
'It costs the same for manufacturers to print Mickey Mouse or the Monkey King, but foreigners want to buy Mickey Mouse,' said a young woman vendor, pointing at a colourful backpack for children.
She also sells fake Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets, which were supposed to have been discontinued after authorities restricted the sale of luxury goods to department stores.
'For a while we put the handbags under the counter,' she said, adding that business in the spring tourist season was now too brisk to hide them.
Jingzhou Tao , managing partner of commercial law firm Coudert Brothers in Beijing, said the cost of reining in counterfeiters was enormous in a country as large as China, where crackdowns in one area simply drove the pirates to another.
He said reforms introduced since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 had resulted in a legal framework that was in 'almost perfect' compliance with the trade group's Trade-related Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
