I just read a recent post on a blog I follow that's written by a computer hardware designer - perhaps most famous for the Chumby - who spends a lot of his time close to his sources, which is to say, in China. The subject is his experience with a shipment of fake flash memory, and his experience has a lot of parallels with, say, buying fake Pu'er cakes:
(I read the blog via RSS. I'd happily give the normal URL for the blog, but it isn't working now.)
/Lew