LITMIR.BIZ

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all the way down to village-level officials, IPR lawyers and judges, domestic and foreign business professionals, and IPR scholars associated with Chinese think tanks and major universities. Ranging from thirty minutes to two hours, my formal interviews mostly took place in the offices of my interviewees. Some of them were conducted at the dinner table, a place where many Chinese people discuss business matters. I interviewed people with a variety of occupations, including twenty-six interviews with IPR officials at different levels, twenty-nine with domestic and foreign business professionals, nineteen with IPR lawyers and judges, and twenty-five with IPR scholars.

      During the early stage of my research, I approached my interviewees through personal connections. As I developed a deeper knowledge of Chinse IPR affairs and my research progressed, I managed to develop my own professional network in the Chinese IPR circle and approached my interviewees by attending academic conferences and government/business meetings. I also started to be more “picky” with my interviewees, based on the level of their expertise and the willingness to share their information. For most of the interviews, I started with a set of general questions, but many interviewees ended up leading the conversation toward the directions that interested them most. That often resulted in unexpected findings that helped me to overcome the selection biases that I originally had. As my research moved on, those interviews with unexpected findings often proved to be most helpful and thus are more frequently quoted in the book chapters to follow. Not all my interviewees welcomed me. Some bluntly asked me, “Are you going to be pro-China or pro-U.S. in your book?” when they encountered what they considered to be thorny questions. Some rejected my interview requests rudely on the phone. Some even questioned the necessity to conduct research on Chinese IPR policy.³³ While not all my interviews succeeded in producing ideal outcomes, the negative interview experiences helped me to get a more complete picture of Chinese IPR policy at the grassroots level and supported my theoretical argument from a different angle.

      While formal interviews are important sources for this study, informal interviews play an indispensable role in supplying necessary information. I conducted informal interviews with sellers and buyers of counterfeit/pirated goods, most of whom occupy much lower social positions than the IPR professionals mentioned above. While most of the informal interviews happened in urban areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, most of the interviewees were migrant workers from inland provinces such as Anhui and Henan. Unlike my formal interviews, the informal interviews were conducted on the street, in stores selling counterfeit and pirated goods, and in basement apartments rented by peasant workers. As a native of East China’s Anhui Province, I conducted informal interviews in the local dialect. This proved to be an effective tool to shorten the distance between the interviewees and me as the interviewer. That is, I detected a higher level of trust from street peddlers who were from the same home province but met in a distant urban area such as Beijing and Shanghai. This made them more candid in relating to me their experiences in selling pirated and counterfeit goods. Under those informal circumstances, I could get information that my interviewees would otherwise not divulge on formal occasions.

      My fieldwork did not isolate interviews from archival research and participant observations. Instead, they were often combined for the purpose of making better sense of the data acquired. During my fieldwork, I accumulated over 1,000 IPR-related journalistic reports, yearbook articles, leadership speeches, and Chinese government newsletters, some of which were for internal circulation only. Most of those documents were published between 1990 and 2014, with some published in the 1980s or even the 1950s. Admittedly, the Chinese media are still controlled by the government, so many of the reports are filled with bureaucratic jargon, and in many cases, the information is purposefully distorted. I mainly employed the following cross-examination methods to excavate useful information from the bureaucratic jargon. First, at the end of many interviews, my interviewees helped me “read between the lines” to cross-examine the archival documents that I had collected. On the other hand, the archival data also helped me verify the validity, or the lack thereof, of the information gathered from my interviews. Second, consciously aware of the sources of the journalistic reports, I compared and contrasted the information published by different media outlets. For example, the IPR reports from People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee, represents the stance of the Chinese Central Government and State Council. Checking that newspaper with the publications of the various ministries in Beijing, the various provinces, cities, or even counties at the local level and the various domestic and foreign business organizations operating in China, I was able to identify important differences in the attitudes toward IPR held by the Chinese central government and the local government branches. That process of cross-examination was very exhausting, time-consuming, and often frustrating, but it turned out to be an extremely rewarding learning experience.

      In August 2007, I participated in several meetings between IPR enforcement officials and several patrons of counterfeiters in a town in N Province during the postraid period.³⁴ In July 2008, I participated in an anticounterfeit raid conducted in Jiangsu Province. These opportunities made me aware of the political and economic dynamics hindering the implementation of IPR policy at the local government level. Moreover, in the fall of 2007, I had the opportunity to share a basement apartment in Beijing with several street peddlers. During the three weeks of living with them, I observed the workings of a significant portion of the underground pirated/counterfeit goods market: the buying and selling of pirated/counterfeit goods, the cat-and-mouse game between street peddlers and law enforcement officials, and part of the distribution network of pirated/counterfeit goods. After that, I maintained contact with them and visited them for further interviews during the follow-up research trips. As far as I know, this level of access for researchers on Chinese IPR issues, from China’s top-level officials to street peddlers selling pirated and counterfeit goods, is very rare.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Political Economy of Chinese Patent Legislation

       Introduction: A Challenging Patent Case and the Adoption of the Chinese Patent Law in the Early 1980s

      December 11, 2001, was an important day for the Chinese intellectual property rights (IPR) circle. On that day, China formally acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) after fifteen years of painstaking negotiations.¹ As an important part of China’s WTO entry negotiations, China signed the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. That move marked China’s de jure compliance with the international IPR regime. Like other issue areas, China reached agreement on IPR after rounds of bitter bargaining. This chapter analyzes the compromises, competition, and controversies among various domestic and foreign interest groups surrounding China’s de jure compliance with the international patent norm.

      To help understand the convoluted decision-making process that culminated in China’s adoption of the IPR norm, I interviewed Ms. Mei, a senior legal adviser at the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO). One of the main goals of my interview was to figure out why China decided to adopt an international norm that it had once rejected. In answering my question, Ms. Mei began by explaining a challenging case that she encountered during an early stage of her career. In the late 1970s, a leading bicycle producer in North China’s Tianjin Municipality exported folding bicycles to a Southeast Asian country. This type of bicycle had a good reputation among the consumers in that country. However, in 1980, the Chinese bicycle company noticed that some factories in that Southeast Asian country were copying the company’s folding bicycles. When the Chinese company complained to that country’s government, they got the following reply: “Your home country does not have a patent law to protect the technology to make the folding bicycle. Why should we protect it in our own country?” The case was reported to the newly established Chinese State Patent Bureau (SPB) in Beijing, the predecessor of the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office, where Ms. Mei served as a junior patent agent. Ms. Mei reported the case to the senior leaders of the SPB. The case further reminded Chinese senior decision makers of the imperativeness of adopting a patent law in China.²

      China eventually has established a sophisticated patent regime over the past three decades. China also joined a series of international IPR agreements. Despite having many critics, it is generally agreed that the standard of patent protection outlined

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