I thought to myself: that’s not what they believe at Nike. Then he told me something else. Li-Ning shoes were purposely priced 20 percent below their Nike and Adidas equivalent. He didn’t explain why, but he didn’t have to. Li-Ning is simply not confident that its current brand can stand up to its big Western competitors.

Truth to tell, neither is just about any other big consumer company in China.

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It is easy when you live in the West to take brands  their power, their ability to conjure up feelings of status among consumers, the loyalty they can generate  completely for granted. Brands are almost part of the air we breathe. But go to China, and you get a whole new appreciation for brands.

One afternoon, for instance, I went to a big five-story mart called the Silk Market, which was lined with tiny retail outlets all selling “branded” goods of every sort  watches and purses, shirts and suits, you name it. As I walked down a crowded aisle, I was inundated with sellers grabbing and clutching me, while pushing their goods under my nose. But they didn’t say, “Do you want a purse?” They shouted: “Louis Vuitton! Gucci! Armani!” All the goods were knock-offs, of course. But it certainly spoke to the power of brands  a fake Louis Vuitton was somehow “better” than a better-made unbranded purse.

You notice it everywhere in China. What is the car of choice in China if you have some money? Surprisingly, an Audi. Why? Because Audi got here early and did the best job among foreign car manufacturers of persuading the Chinese that an Audi is a symbol that you’ve made it. Everybody wants an iPhone  even though they are not even sold yet in China. Stroll down a fancy mall in Shanghai or Beijing and they’re all cluttered with the familiar Western brands.

And not a single big Chinese brand. Partly, it is understandable that China would be lacking in brands as big as Toyota or Sony. It took Japan decades of work and innovation for those brands to succeed internationally: China’s experiment in capitalism is less than three decades old, and it has grown up around low-cost manufacturing. For a long time, this was a country of scarcity  it still is in some parts  so there was no need for anything so high-falutin as branding. Even when that began to change, the primary way Chinese companies competed was on price.

Image A corner of the Li-Ning campus in Beijing. The athletic wear company is trying to compete with better-known global brands. Credit... Du Bin for The New York Times

There is another reason, too. There is a powerful sense among Chinese consumers that domestic brands are inferior  and a distinct lack of confidence among Chinese companies in the allure of their own brands. “It is very difficult to be a Chinese brand,” said Feng Jun, the 39-year-old founder of Aigo, a consumer electronics company that also has high hopes of conquering the West with its branded products. (Among other things, it makes the most popular Chinese digital music player.) “No one in China believes in a Chinese brand.”