Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Doi
Abstract
Intellectual property has been a crucial issue for China in the
past four decades. Internationally, it was central to China’s
fifteen-year negotiation on its accession to the WTO and has been
a priority in China-US bilateral relations. Domestically, changes
in the regulation and use of intellectual property reflect a
larger picture of rapid economic and social transition in China.
Initially, China was a rule-taker in intellectual property,
experiencing pressure from abroad to do much more on intellectual
property. In response, China enacted comprehensive domestic
intellectual property laws. From 2001, the Chinese Trademark
Office was registering more trademarks than any other office in
the world and from 2011, the State Intellectual Property Office
of China (SIPO) became the world's largest patent office. Today
the Chinese government promotes intellectual property protection
in its national strategy of “innovation-driven development”
and seeks to transform China into the world’s leading
intellectual property power.
This thesis focuses on whether the large-scale deployment of
intellectual property by China in various markets means that it
has become a regulatory power in intellectual property, in the
sense of being an agenda setter and source of global influence
over IP rules. The UK in the nineteenth century and the US in the
twentieth were regulatory IP powers in this sense.
China’s regulatory and international influence over IP rules is
tracked empirically through case studies on geographical
indications (Chapter 3), the disclosure obligation (Chapter 4),
and intellectual property and standardization (Chapter 5), along
with an examination of China’s international IP engagement at
the bilateral level (Chapter 6) and plurilateral and multilateral
levels (Chapter 7). This thesis also analyses the roles of
sub-state actors and non-state actors in China’s international
intellectual property engagement (Chapter 8).
This thesis argues that China’s role in international
intellectual property regulation is more nuanced and complicated
than a binary categorization of “rule-maker” or
“rule-taker”. China’s international IP engagement is guided
by a group of key principles, specifically the principles of IP
instrumentalism and a set of foreign policy principles. These
principles have been implemented through a process of modeling,
while potential conflicts have been minimized through a strategy
of balancing. The effects of modeling are compliance and
institutional isomorphism which makes the Chinese IP system
similar to those of developed countries. Balancing leads to
constructed inconsistency and has led China into keeping a
low-profile in international policy debates on intellectual
property
