This article moves beyond debates over motive and legitimacy to examine how profit-seeking among Chinese counterfeit hunters takes shape, operates, and produces social and regulatory consequences. Shaped by punitive damages, complaint and reporting mechanisms, and platform commerce, profit-seeking takes three forms: composite, professionalized, and predatory. Operationally, claiming compensation functions as the foundational practice, while agency services, content marketing, and training schools provide additional revenue paths. These practices burden merchants, generate derivative markets for countering counterfeit hunters, and occupy regulatory resources, prompting the state to turn from enabling consumer-led supervision to managing the supervisors themselves.
In 1970, the Hong Kong pavilion at the World Exposition in Osaka offered a narrative of free trade and laissez-faire. It was a narrative that came to impact all subsequent interpretations of the territory’s economic development right up to the present day. This article examines the circumstances behind the pavilion and analyses the ideas and interests involved in creating the narrative. It argues that this narrative was a particular interpretation of Hong Kong’s development and contrary to existing understandings, it was not natural but rather actively constructed in response to an unstable international context that threatened economic development. Drawing on local archives, the article further argues that the narrative presented at Expo ’70 came to be appropriated by economists not only in explanation of Hong Kong, but also to support neoclassical theories of national economic development.
