The Origin of China's Knockoff Gundam Market: BENDI, GHD, and Xiao Bai Long

It was 1995, an era when China's manufacturing capacities were still in their infant stage. There was no official way to buy a Gundam model kit in mainland China. Bandai had no retail presence, no authorized dealers, no distribution network. If you wanted genuine Gunpla, your options were traveling abroad (Hong Kong was still under British administration and counted as a foreign destination) or buying through gray market channels - smuggled stock that arrived with markup to match the risk.

We wrote about the origin of the Gundam bootleg where it arguably started in South Korea in the 1980s, and this is the story when the baton was passed to Hong Kong and then to mainland China. The "legend" of the three KO brands that arguably sowed the seeds for the KO market.

The Pricing & Information Gap

The national average urban worker monthly wage in 1995 was around 460 RMB (~$46) in China with coastal provinces, especially the ones that are closer to Hong Kong, faring better at around 690 RMB (~$69). To put that in perspective, a genuine 1/144 Gundam Wing kit retailed at 500 yen (~$5) in Japan. But by the time it reached China through gray market channels - smuggled in from Hong Kong or Japan with markup at every step - that same small kit could easily cost 50-100 RMB ($5-$10). Larger scale kits ran even higher. Either way, we're talking about a significant chunk of a working person's monthly income for a single model kit.

Then there's the information gap. Along the southern coast, proximity to Hong Kong and Taiwan meant exposure to Japanese pop culture through satellite TV spillover, cross-border trade, and a steady flow of pirated media. Kids in other places? Not so much yet.

From my memory at the time, my monthly allowance as a middle school student was 10 RMB (~$1). That was enough to buy plenty of snacks and small, one or two really roughly made, military themed scale model kits. Gundam? To be honest, never seen it, but only heard of it through murmurs.

- Simon

The G Gundam and Gundam Wing Hit

Mobile Fighter G Gundam (1994-1995) and New Mobile Report Gundam Wing (1995-1996) aired in Japan as part of the Heisei trilogy that was trying to pull Gundam out of its Universal Century comfort zone. In China, neither show went through official channels. They didn't need to.

Both shows spread through pirated VCDs and aired on some regional TV stations. But the reach was uneven. Coastal cities got it first and in higher quality. Inland provinces got it later, often through nth-generation VCD copies sold at street markets. The result was a rolling wave of demand that moved from the coast inward over a period of years - And everywhere it landed, it established new fans. Like all of us as fans, the itch for a figure or model kit from the show starts to build. But for these new fans, accessibility was zero. This is when factory owners in Guangdong - China's plastics and toy manufacturing hub - saw the opportunity to fill the gap.

The 老D Era (1995-1996)

"老D" (lao-D), the name given to underground knockoff Gundam kits, first appeared in Hong Kong. These were "faithful" reproductions - no logo, no branding, and the source of production was rumored to be underground Hong Kong operations. Kits packed in flimsy boxes with generic labels like "机动战士高达" (Mobile Suit Gundam) and nothing else. The quality? Let's just say it was solving the problem of existence, not luxury.

Eventually, these operations were rumored to have moved to Guangdong, where the legal jurisdiction was more or less grey. And call it what you will, this is when the first KO seeds were sowed. Dozens of small Guangdong operations started cranking out 1/144 copies of Wing Gundam, Deathscythe, Shenlong, and Sandrock.

The kits were rough. Tolerances were enormous, detail was mushy and flash lines ran everywhere. But they only cost around 15-20 RMB ($1.50-$2) a box - roughly one-tenth the price of a genuine Bandai kit bought through gray market channels - and they were available. In small mom and pop shops around schools, at night markets, flea markets, basically everywhere that Bandai was not. To be fair, Bandai was not in China at all. As bad as these kits were, they solved the existence problem and the fans finally had their itch scratched, roughly to be fair.

At this point, we wonder what would happen next. Oh right, competition creates opportunities and encourages improvements. And voila, the KO seeds are now sprouting.

BENDI: The First Name in Bootleg Gundam (~1997)

The first mainland Chinese bootleg brand to actually print its name on a box was BENDI (本迪).

The company behind it was Jiaxin Model (嘉鑫模型), based in Guangdong. The brand name was not subtle - "BENDI" was a deliberate phonetic echo of "Bandai," designed to blur the line for buyers who didn't know the difference. There's even a rumor that hobby shop owners in the Philippines told customers BENDI was just Bandai's Chinese brand name. Whether that's true or not, the name was doing exactly what it was designed to do.

BENDI rode the Gundam Wing wave hard. Its core lineup was 1/144 kits from the W and X series - Wing Zero, Deathscythe, Shenlong, Sandrock, Heavyarms - and it was consistently the fastest bootleg manufacturer to market whenever a new anime debuted new mobile suits. That speed and production capacity was its primary competitive advantage, and for a while it was a significant one.

The early BENDI kits were not good, but they were not the worst thing on the market either. The plastic had a distinctive feel - soft and elastic, which meant parts were hard to sand smooth but also surprisingly resilient. Chinese hobbyists used to compare BENDI to Nokia phones - you can drop it, and it won't break. That durability is quite impressive for a 15 RMB (roughly $1.50 at the time) model kit. Although durability and drop tests are two things that aren't usually on any model builder's checklist.

Surface quality on the early runs were passable. Fit, on the other hand, not so much. Instructions were black-and-white photocopied sheets, sometimes just a single folded page, all in Chinese or in some cases, Chinese on one side and Russian on the other. The priority was clear at the time. With reasonable and questionable quality to solve the existence problem. Fitting was not part of the plan. To put it bluntly, if you finished a BENDI kit and it holds as one coherent piece, you won.

Around 1998, BENDI made an attempt to bootleg MG GP-01, its first time trying the larger 1/100 scale, but failed miserably. If you were able to win by putting together a 1/144 BENDI kit, then the 1/100 kit was, to put it lightly, mission impossible.

GHD: The Bootleg Empire That Allegedly Beat Bandai in Court

智恒达 (Zhihengda), operating under the brand codes GD and later GHD, was the second of the three major bootleg brands and by far the most ambitious. The company registered in Hong Kong in 2001 with its actual production in Guangdong.

While BENDI stuck mostly to 1/144 kits, GHD took shots at every scale, even the 1/60 PG. The model was simple: if a mobile suit appeared in a TV series or movie, it's on the table. At one point, GHD even released a PG Strike Gundam before Bandai got to the game. The ambition was real, but execution? That's a completely different story.

Quality? What quality? The same thing you've just read about BENDI applies perfectly to GHD and more. The community in China used to call it "狗货的" (Gou Huo De) which maps to GHD perfectly in abbreviation. Translation? "Dog Production." It's a rage-filled, perfectly intended, carefully crafted, and humorously created insult.

You thought BENDI was bad? How about greasy runners as the appetizer, parts that look like they were intentionally made to not fit as the main course, and a super glue requirement as the dessert. And yet, for many mobile suits, GHD was the only option for the fans. The price was set at 30-50 RMB ($3-$5 at the time), making them harder to pass.

GHD also carried the most persistent urban legend in Chinese Gundam hobby circles: that Bandai sued GHD over the "高达" (Gundam) name and lost because GHD registered it before Bandai did. And GHD became "the only legal Gundam in China." How much of it is true? We will see in a bit. Calling the early 2000s Chinese bootleg market the Wild Wild West, wait, East, is not a far fetch.

Xiao Bai Long (2004-2005)

If you made it this far with this article, you may be asking "You said three brands, what's the third one?" Hold my Baijiu (Chinese liquor), and here comes Xiao Bai Long.

小白龙 (literally "Little White Dragon") was one of the three major brands to scale up, and it took a different approach than either BENDI or GHD.

Where BENDI and GHD chased speed-to-market with a car and a motorcycle, Xiao Bai Long chased distribution depth with an 18-wheeler. Its strategy was to flood the cheapest possible channel with the cheapest possible product: FG-grade (First Grade, Bandai's simplest product tier) kits from the Gundam SEED lineup, priced at the 10 RMB (~$1) level, sold through every possible venue that were close to schools where students actually spent their allowances.

The timing was perfect. Gundam SEED was the first officially licensed Gundam series to air across nearly the entire country in the mid-2000s. The demand for kits was exploding and Xiao Bai Long met that demand.

Xiao Bai Long's packaging game was remarkable for its audacity. The boxes featured laser hologram stickers printed with "日本技术优质正货" - "Japanese Technology, Authentic Quality Product." A brazen claim for a company whose entire business model was unauthorized reproduction. But in an era when most Chinese consumers had never seen genuine Bandai packaging up close, the hologram actually worked. It looked official. It felt official. The kits themselves told a different story. Better translations than BENDI, cleaner molding than GHD, but still stripped down to the bare minimum of what you can call a model kit. Xiao Bai Long was competing on access, and it was winning.

Xiao Bai Long's run ended through a series of lawsuits. First from GHD in 2007. Remember the rumor about GHD won the lawsuit brought by Bandai because of early trademark registration? This lawsuit brought by GHD was exactly based on trademark dispute and GHD actually won again. Then Xiao Bai Long got hit again from Bandai and Sunrise in 2012 and quietly settled. By 2013, it claimed to have pivoted entirely to toy building blocks and "original-IP" children's toys, eventually going public on the Chinese stock exchange. It is still around today under the same name but did they really pivot completely away? You be the judge.

The Fall of the Three Kings

TT Hongli stepped up first, bringing noticeably improvement to mold quality and sold at roughly the same price tier. Then GaoGao (高高) appeared with even better quality and mold precisions. Both started building the most comprehensive KO catalog at quality and scale that BENDI, GHD, and Xiao Bai Long never reached. Bandai eventually cracked the Chinese market in mid 2010s, but failed to bend the progression of KO. When Bandai's 2012 crackdown forced GaoGao to shut down, its core team didn't disappear, but instead regrouped and formed Daban. And then the rise and fall of the Dragon Momoko, and decade long of wild KO market growth followed.

BENDI was first to shut down its operation as making super lower quality, although dirt cheap, kits no longer meets the demand of the "market" and couldn't stop the bleeding. GHD kept producing into early 2010s and eventually faded for similar reasons.

What Came After

The factory raids, the prison sentence, the counterfeiting arms race that followed - that's its own story. But the seeds were sowed, started sprouting and eventually broke out into the KO gray market that's still, for the lack of better words, thriving.