Five Oft-Repeated Questions about China’s Recent Rise as a Patent Power

This Article focuses on five key questions that I have been repeatedly asked in presentations or conferences exploring recent intellectual property developments in China. As the answers will suggest, the future of the Chinese intellectual property system is rather complex. This future reflects neither a rosy picture of China’s “great leap forward” in the intellectual property arena nor a continuously gloomy picture of pirates and counterfeiters. Instead, the picture is dualistic and highly dynamic.

It includes both yin and yang—the yin of continued massive piracy and counterfeiting and the yang of China’s rise as a patent power.