US to Initiatie WTO Claim Against China’s IPR Practices (or Lack Thereof)
October 30th, 2006China worked hard to get into the WTO, and now is being asked to live by the terms of it WTO membership.
You can’t do much shopping (or even walking around) in China without running into flagrant IPR violations, but for a more nuanced appreciation of the problem I highly recommend Andrew Mertha’s book The Politics of Privacy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China. He explains how even the best-intended efforts to enforce IPR standards can be frustrated by China’s splintered and evolving political landscape.
It’s certainly fair for trading partners to hold China to the terms of its WTO membership, but given current political winds in China, I suspect a WTO action will tend to spur resistance or empty gestures more than real cooperation. U.S. politics are of course also at play—perhaps in the timing of this announcement days before elections?
Generally, as China gets richer I am seeing more and more “real stuff” for sale. The other night I walked into an outdoor store with real-deal expensive hiking boots and camping equipment. I’ve seen plenty of North Fakes, but the legit stuff is on sale now, too. There’s a growing domestic lobby for greater IPR enforcement, as well as a thriving black market.
To test the efficiency of China’s piracy trafficking, in my Doing Business in China travel courses I’ve offered a bounty to the student who brings me the first copy of a Hollywood movie released right around the time of our arrival in China (it was a Star Wars installment one year, the Da Vinici Code another). Invariably, the disc is on the streets of Shanghai as soon as (if not before) it is in theatres.
Piracy feels great to consumers (the whole Sex in the City corpus for US 8 instead of 200!), but I follow-up by asking students to name their favorite Chinese brand. Sometimes they think of Qingdao. Maybe Lenovo. Haier or Galanz if they’ve done the assigned reading. But clothes? Silence. I then ask them to check their labels for “Made in China” when they get home; everybody wears stuff made here, nobody can name a Chinese designer brand. More disturbingly, what breakthrough drugs has China discovered in the last 30 years of economic reforms? Despite all their scientific talent, they are under-contributing to human progress and retarding the development of some parts of their own economy. That’s the real cost of rampant knock-offs.
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