The Dragon Momoko Story: Factory Raids, a Prison Sentence, and the Counterfeit Gundam Market

The Gundam knockoff market - KOs, bootlegs, counterfeits, whatever you want to call them - has a history that reads like a crime thriller. Factory raids, rival companies allegedly turning each other in, a CEO sentenced to prison, and brands that kept crawling out of the wreckage under new names with the old logo still molded into the runners. It's messy, it's dramatic, and regardless of which side of the fence you're on with KOs, the history is worth telling.

No company sits at the center of that history quite like Dragon Momoko.

Before Dragon Momoko

By the time Dragon Momoko entered the picture, Gundam knockoffs had already been through multiple generations. The earliest mainland Chinese bootlegs came from brands like Bendi (本迪) in the late 1990s, riding the Gundam Wing boom. By the 2000s, Shantou - China's toy manufacturing hub - had spawned a succession of increasingly capable bootleg operations: GHD (智恒达), which set the early quality bar; Xiaobailong (小白龙), which flooded the little mom-and-pop shops near schools with cheap 1/144 kits; and GaoGao (高高, formerly TT Hongli), which became the most comprehensive counterfeit Gundam brand before Bandai's 2012 crackdown forced them to shut down. When GaoGao's core team regrouped, they formed Daban - the brand that would become Dragon Momoko's primary rival.

Dragon Momoko walked into this landscape and did something different.

How Dragon Momoko Got Big

Dragon Momoko operated under the company name Muzi Animation Toys (木子动漫玩具有限公司), founded in November 2009 and based in Shantou, run by CEO Li Haiyan (李海雁). The company began producing counterfeit Gundam kits around 2016, and Dragon Momoko's peak lineup included the Avalanche Exia, Blue Astray, and Unicorn variants - kits that built a serious following among builders.

What set Dragon Momoko apart from the bootleg brands that came before was ambition. They didn't limit themselves to straight 1:1 counterfeits of existing Bandai kits. They started producing kits based on mobile suit designs that Bandai hadn't released - most famously, an MG Tallgeese III that had no official Bandai counterpart at the time. Fans had been requesting that kit for years. When Bandai eventually did release their own Tallgeese III, it came as a P-Bandai exclusive - higher price, web shop only, limited availability.

Dragon Momoko kits featured undergated runners as standard practice, minimizing visible nub marks after parts were clipped from the runner. They added surface detail and sharper panel lines compared to some of the Bandai originals they were working from. Their Metal Build-inspired versions of SEED-era suits like the Destiny and Strike Freedom incorporated design elements from Bandai's premium collectible figures and sold at roughly a third of the price.

The community was split then, and it's split now. To Bandai and to a large portion of the hobby, Dragon Momoko was a counterfeit operation stealing Gundam IP owned by Sunrise without a license. The Tallgeese III, the Destiny, the Strike Freedom - these are all Gundam designs. Undergated runners and sharper panel lines don't change that. To Dragon Momoko's fanbase, the picture looked different. They saw a company filling gaps in Bandai's lineup with engineering choices that prioritized the builder's experience, at price points Bandai wasn't matching.

Both of these perspectives miraculously are still alive in the hobby today.

The Daban Rivalry

Daban - the reformed GaoGao team, also based in Shantou - was Dragon Momoko's most direct competitor. Two bootleg companies in the same city, drawing from the same manufacturing cluster, going after the same customers.

Daban launched their own Metal Build-style kits, including a Strike Freedom with a gold-coated inner frame. Both companies were now competing against each other as much as against Bandai. Community discourse shifted from "Bandai vs. bootleg" to "Daban vs. Dragon Momoko."

There was an absurd edge to it. These were two companies whose product lines were built on stealing Bandai's intellectual property, and they were accusing each other of stealing designs. This wasn't even new for the bootleg market - back in 2007, GHD had actually sued Xiaobailong for infringement and forced them to pull their Gundam product line. Bootleg companies going after each other in court over designs that belonged to neither of them. You can't make this stuff up.

The competition did have a practical effect on the kits. Dragon Momoko leaned into detail modifications and engineering tweaks that went beyond simple reproduction. Daban focused on precision molding and scale coverage, including PG kits priced at roughly a fifth of Bandai's retail. Both companies pushed each other to differentiate.

The Raid

In mid-September 2017, Bandai filed a complaint with the Shanghai Fengxian police, reporting that a domestic manufacturer was producing and selling products that infringed their copyright. Police traced online sales through two Taobao stores - "New Trend Anime Mall" and "Unique Gundam Model Shop" - back to a single source: Muzi Animation Toys in Shantou.

By late September, Shanghai Fengxian police traveled to Shantou and raided three manufacturing sites plus Muzi Animation's offices. They seized over 3,500 infringing kits - Avalanche Exia, Blue Astray, Unicorn variants - along with multiple sets of production molds and computer design files. Li Haiyan and three other staff were placed under criminal detention. Both Taobao stores were shut down.

In October, police commissioned the China Copyright Protection Center to formally compare three Dragon Momoko kits against their Bandai counterparts: the Unicorn, Avalanche Exia, and Exia. The examination compared contours, body structures, and overall visual expression. The conclusion: the Dragon Momoko kits were reproductions. Minor differences in weapons and backpack components didn't constitute original work. The seized design files were found to be highly similar to Bandai's own documents.

In the English-speaking community, the news hit like a shockwave - and nobody had the full picture. Bits and pieces trickled out through forum posts, blurry factory photos, and secondhand translations of Chinese news articles. Nobody knew what was confirmed and what was rumor. Was it Bandai? Was it Daban who tipped them off? Was Dragon Momoko done for good, or would they come back under a new name like every other bootleg brand before them? Retailers started canceling preorders with no explanation. Some offered refunds. Others just went silent. Scalpers who had been sitting on unopened Dragon Momoko kits realized what they were holding and prices exploded overnight - the Avalanche Exia Dash reportedly jumped from around $70 to nearly $350 on the secondary market. The entire community was scrambling for answers that wouldn't fully arrive for months.

The Sentence

In October 2018, the Shanghai Third Intermediate Court issued its final ruling.

Li Haiyan's defense in court was, in its own way, fascinating. He argued that Dragon Momoko kits were original work because the internal parts and assembly sequences were different from Bandai's. In other words: the outside might look the same, but the inside is ours, so it's not a counterfeit.

The Shanghai Third Intermediate Court wasn't buying it. Copyright protection, the court ruled, applies to the overall visual and artistic expression of a design - not how the pieces snap together on the inside. If two kits look the same on the shelf, the fact that step 14 in the instruction manual is different doesn't make one of them original. External similarity in form, structure, and aesthetic presentation was sufficient to constitute reproduction under Chinese copyright law.

Li Haiyan was convicted of copyright infringement. Three years and six months in prison. A fine of 1.9 million CNY (roughly $285,000 USD). All seized molds and inventory were ordered destroyed. The case value totaled 3.7 million CNY across the 2016-2017 production period. Dragon Momoko as a brand was finished. The case was listed as #7 in the National Copyright Administration's official "Sword Net 2017" enforcement report on People's Daily (人民网), alongside 19 other major copyright cases from that year.

The community reaction played out exactly the way the preceding years of debate would predict. Some builders felt justice had been served. Others mourned. Some directed frustration at Bandai. Others asked why Daban hadn't been targeted instead. That question would be answered less than a year later, when Daban's own operations were raided in a separate case - but that's a story for another article.

After the Fall

Within months of Dragon Momoko's shutdown, kits appeared under the MJH brand name, widely believed to be connected to former Dragon Momoko staff or associates. The kits shipped in plain white boxes with minimal branding - a far cry from Dragon Momoko's flashy packaging.

Supernova, another bootleg brand producing Gundam Wing kits with redesigned proportions, went through a similar cycle. After the broader crackdown wave, Supernova kits appeared under the name "Mo Xin" (Mirror Heart SuperNova) in plain white boxes. The runners still said "Supernova."

The pattern repeated across the market. Enforcement hits, a brand goes dark, something familiar resurfaces under a new name.

And the crackdowns didn't stop the market. Not even close. Daban is still alive and still releasing kits. New counterfeit brands surface regularly, and the pace has only accelerated - almost every week, a new KO kit gets leaked or announced. The bootleg Gundam market in 2025 and 2026 isn't winding down. If anything, it's more active than it was during the Dragon Momoko era. The enforcement campaigns took out specific companies, but they didn't kill the demand that created those companies in the first place.

Dragon Momoko kits, meanwhile, never stopped circulating. Unopened Dragon Momoko boxes still trade on eBay and secondhand markets today, often at prices well above what they originally sold for. A Deathscythe Hell that once went for $30-40 now lists for $125-150. The Avalanche Exia Dash commands $159 and up. Whether people like it or not, the kits have taken on a collector's market of their own - scarcity pricing on products that were never supposed to exist in the first place.

Where the Story Goes Next

Dragon Momoko's story doesn't end with a prison sentence and a pile of confiscated molds.

Li Haiyan served his time and was released around early 2021. In July of that year, Guangdong HeMoXian Culture Co., Ltd. (广东和模线文化有限公司) was registered, with Li's wife Zheng Nichan as the legal representative. The same person, the same technical expertise, the same Shantou manufacturing network - pointed in a completely different direction.

Even the name is a statement. Within the Chinese hobby community, 和模线 is read as a deliberate message: 和 (to part with, to cut ties) + 模线 (the counterfeit mold line). Cut ties with the counterfeit line. Li reportedly vowed never to touch counterfeit products again, and the brand name is the vow made permanent. Every product HeMoXian releases is original IP. No Gundam silhouettes, no Sunrise designs, no gray areas.

HeMoXian's flagship Over Zero series features 1/10 scale cybernetically enhanced soldiers with proprietary TPE soft-rubber joint technology that simulates muscle deformation during posing. It's engineering that has no equivalent anywhere in the snap-fit model kit space. The kits are entirely original characters with their own lore, their own design language, and their own mechanical systems. The team that once made some of the hobby's most notorious counterfeits is now making some of its most innovative originals.

Whether that's a redemption story or just good business sense depends on who's telling it. Either way, it's where the Dragon Momoko story actually ends up.

We covered HeMoXian's full story - who they are, what they make, and what they're building now - in our HeMoXian brand guide.

Sources

National Copyright Administration of China, "Sword Net 2017 Typical Cases Report" (Case #7), published on People's Daily (人民网), January 16, 2018 - people.com.cn

The Paper (澎湃新闻), "Dragon Momoko model kits suspected of infringing Japanese Gundam copyright, 4 detained" (龙桃子模型涉嫌侵犯日本高达著作权被查，4人被刑拘), December 10, 2017 - thepaper.cn

Sunrise / Bandai / Bandai Spirits joint statement on Dragon Momoko criminal conviction (关于中国仿冒高达模型品牌"龙桃子"刑事判决的公告), November 30, 2018 - published on Bandai Model official Weibo (@万代模型)

3Wyu.com (三文娱), "Dragon Momoko investigated by Shanghai police for suspected Gundam copyright infringement" (涉嫌盗版高达，龙桃子被上海警方查处), 2017

BeyondModel (不止模型), "Who is behind Dragon Momoko?" (硬核解析：天国龙桃子的背后是谁？), Bilibili, 2025 - bilibili.com