This is an outstanding academic achievement with an exceptionally high level of scholarship on the politics of intellectual property rights (IPR) in China. Martin K. Dimitrov makes three major arguments. First, both Chinese state capacity and the level of enforcement of IPR are low; second, the so-called campaign style of enforcement is ineffective; and finally, legal protections are improving much more than enforcement practices. Yet IPR protection is improving very slowly in China. In certain areas, such as copyright and patents, the role of law has become significant, while in other areas, such as trademarks, it is far from perfect.
A key academic contribution of this book is its research effort. The author painstakingly carried out 239 interviews in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zouping County, Jinan, Dalian, Haikou, and Hong Kong with people from different walks of life. He improves the analysis by looking from a comparative angle with further interviews in Russia, Taiwan, France, and the United States. The logic behind this is certainly to give the reader a broader perspective on comparative studies of IPR. Yet those choices partly reflect the priority watch lists of the U.S. government's major concerns. Nevertheless, my review will focus on IPR in China.
The book is divided into four main sections: an introduction, the organization of the state, the state in action, and a conclusion. The introduction goes beyond a simple summary. Two separate chapters look at the framework and major highlights of the problems of IPR regulations. The author puts forward a term called “shirking,” which generally refers to the refusal to enforce hard cases. Such behavior extends into almost every state sector and fundamentally distorts the behavior of the enforcement bodies. Furthermore, weak state capacity can be observed from the absence “of public data about appeals procedures and appeals frequency” (p. 84).
The major explanation for weak state capacity, according to Dimitrov, is that Chinese courts have always been marginalized because they are both unprofessional and political. They are unprofessional because lawyers and judges receive very little training. Courts have been politicized because the Chinese Communist Party both disciplines the courts and puts party members above the law. To give a better overview of the administrative enforcement organizations in China, chapter 5 specifies individual departments' and bureaus' responsibility and power over the three major sectors of IPR: trademark enforcement by the Ministry of Health, the State Food and Drug Administration, and the Ministry of Agriculture; copyright enforcement by the Ministry of Culture and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television; and patent enforcement by the State Intellectual Property Office.
Chapters 7–9 illustrate disputes in the areas of trademarks, copyrights, and patents, respectively. In the case of cigarettes, the author undertook an extensive and systematic newspaper analysis to shed light on a virtually inaccessible topic. The author rightly points out that copyright enforcement is better than trademark protection.
The excellence of this book leads me to draw attention to two issues related to IPR in China that I hope will attract further research. First, IPR infringement studies generally focus on large companies. Increasingly, however, a large number of small and medium-sized companies may need a more flexible management of IPR. For instance, a low-cost or even public repository of intellectual property products may help them carry out their daily work on high-quality but not necessarily high-end products. Second, in terms of trademark protection, a consensus has formed within China that domestic Chinese brands should receive better protection, which conforms with the author's findings. Such an example of the “rule of law” with Chinese characteristics is very intriguing for legal scholars as well as political scientists.
