Blogger in China finds a few bad Apples

The 27-year-old blogger, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the setup of the stores was so convincing that the employees themselves seemed to believe they worked for Apple.

“It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue T-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks,’’ she wrote on her blog.

“But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly. Apple never writes ‘Apple Store’ on its signs - it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.’’

A worker at the fake Apple Store on Zhengyi Road in Kunming, which most of the photos of the BirdAbroad blog show, said by phone that it is an “Apple store’’ before hanging up.

But the three stores are not among the authorized resellers listed on Apple Inc.’s website. The maker of the iPhone and other hit gadgets has four company stores in China - two in Beijing and two in Shanghai - and various official resellers.

Amy Bessette, a spokeswoman for Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., said had the company had no comment on the Chinese stores, but pointed to a Web page on Apple’s Chinese site that lists its authorized resellers.

The manager of an authorized reseller in Kunming, who gave only his surname, Zhang, said most customers have no idea the stores are fake.

Some of the staff in the stores “can’t even operate computers properly or tell you all the functions of the mobile phone,’’ he said.

“There are more and more of these fake stores in Kunming. Although they may sell real Apple products, some of those products were not imported through legal means,’’ Zhang said.

The proliferation of the fake stores underlines the slow progress that China’s government is making in countering a culture of rampant piracy and widespread production of bogus goods that is a major irritant in relations with trading partners.

China’s commerce minister promised American executives earlier this year that the latest of several crackdowns on product piracy would deliver results.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported this month that police arrested more than 9,000 suspects in a nine-month antipiracy campaign as the government shut down more than 12,000 factories that produced counterfeit goods. China’s supreme court said this spring that the nation’s judicial system rendered verdicts last year in more than 40,000 intellectual property cases involving property with a combined value of almost $1.2 billion.

Piracy is an especially sensitive issue at a time when Washington and other Western governments are trying to create jobs by boosting exports. Rampant copying also has hampered Beijing’s efforts to attract technology industries.