Intellectual Property Rights in China. Zhenqing Zhang
in the budgetary and personnel allocations of the regional IPOs only serves as a partial measurement of their capacity and effectiveness. In the affluent provinces/municipalities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, the IPOs can obtain a better share of budgetary and personnel allocations because the tasks of managing patent activities in those regions are more numerous. IPOs in the relatively backward inland provinces may have less of a budget and fewer personnel. As suggested by the example cited at the beginning of the chapter, however, effective patent enforcement is still possible, even in a province that is traditionally regarded as having low respect for IPR. The condition for determining patent enforcement, of course, is whether it is believed to enhance their region’s economic development and improve their competitiveness in foreign trade. Some subnational IPOs may be “weak” in the sense that they are not as well financed and well staffed as their counterparts in coastal provinces, but their enforcement efforts can be effective if they can prove that patent protection will benefit the overall economic advancement of the area. This logic holds across inland and coastal provinces alike. The following fieldwork experience further illustrates this point. Before I ended my research trip to Changxi City, Mr. Huang told me,
Of course we should be better financed and better staffed than before. That is because the likelihood of IPR theft is going to increase with our rapid economic development. Should we be jealous of our comrades in the coastal provinces, who are even better financed and better staffed than us? Maybe, but do not forget that their duty is probably heavier than [ours]. It is not fair to measure the effectiveness of our work according to how many people enforce how many cases. Patent enforcement is part of our work. Our patent work is effective if the patent policy that we designed can serve our economic development and serve it well.41
The above analysis indicates that the Chinese patent bureaucracy has never existed in a vacuum. A fuller understanding of patent protection in China should adopt a holistic approach and consider the social, economic, and political environment in which these bureaucracies operate. An integrative approach can yield a more nuanced understanding of the functions of the Chinese patent bureaucracy. In discussing the relationship between patent protection and other aspects of patent work in China, I did not touch on the role of Chinese IPR holders. Although the least parsimonious variable in the equation, patent holders are by no means the least important. In fact, the patent protection apparatus would not exist if patent holders did not feel that their interests were being harmed. The next section discusses the various patent holders.
Chinese Patent Policy and the Societal Actors
The previous section established the principal rationale for designing Chinese patent policy on the state side, and this section studies the effect of Chinese patent policy on the country’s various business actors. After all, it is the Chinese business community whose interests are directly affected by the implementation of Chinese patent policy. The following questions guide my discussion: Who creates patents and who holds them? Who infringes upon them? What does the notion of patent mean for patent holders and patent infringers? How important (or unimportant) is the issue of patents for them? Why is the patent issue important for some business actors but not others? During the defense and infringement activities, who are the winners and losers?
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