The U. S. government continues to whistle past the graveyard with respect to the enforcement of intellectual property law in China:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The government wants China to show “measurable progress” on piracy and other issues straining trade relations at a high-level meeting next month, the top trade official said on Wednesday.
Trade Representative Rob Portman said Washington also is pressing China to open its market to more US goods and to respond to concerns about domestic industrial subsidies by the April 11 trade meeting that precedes Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington nine days later.
“This will be a pivotal month,” Portman told reporters, referring to the lead up to Hu’s visit.
“Over the next month, we will know one way or another whether they’re serious about reducing the piracy that disproportionately affects US exports,” Portman said.
Washington wants China to take several “very specific” actions to cut widespread piracy of American films and music, “including the closing down of specific plants,” Portman said.
“We would need to see some kind of measurable progress” for the April 11 Joint Committee on Commerce and Trade (JCCT) meeting to be a success, Portman said, referring to an annual high-level meeting between Portman, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi.
Washington believes Beijing could open the door for billions of dollars of increased US exports through tougher enforcement of laws against piracy and counterfeiting.
China’s refusal to allow more than 20 foreign films to enter the legitimate Chinese market each year also creates a huge demand for pirated goods, industry officials complain.
China simply doesn’t have the social or legal infrastructure necessary for enforcing Western-style intellectual property law. There’s no tradition of such a thing there. The very idea is a meaningless noise.
And, besides, they wouldn’t want to place themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
We’ve got to face the facts: China continues to be a command economy and they will continue to block our exports in any number of ways. Staking our economic future on intellectual property and off-shoring manufacturing to China is not a winning strategy for us.
China simply doesn’t have the social or legal infrastructure necessary for enforcing Western-style intellectual property law.
Even if they accept a legal infrastructure, the effect of decades of communist ideology is that stealing ideas isn’t the same as stealing “things”. Chinese physics grad students used to tell me this all the time – that’s why they wouldn’t discuss their dissertations-in-progress with anyone other than their immediate adviser; they were too scared that someone would swipe their ideas or their data. Indeed, that sort of thing did happen, stuff that wasn’t caught until after the U. handed out the Ph.D. – so the Administration did their best to protect the U. by covering things up.
So instead of Western values spreading to China, the values of the Chinese are spreading here. This is called cultural superiority.
(Hey, twenty years ago Singapore used to be the problem. But they revised their system and values when, as they developed, their own intellectual property and collective prosperity was threatened. )