the notion of IPR has been growing, which is very different from the situation in the early 1980s.”19 During a follow-up interview with that scholar, he further added, “When we started to advocate IPR protection in the early 1980s, many people thought that we were crazy. They did not even bother to consult us on IPR affairs. Now nobody ridicules us as crazy, but I am obsessed with dealing with IPR complaints every day. The IPR cases that we deal with now are much more complex than before, with the stakes much higher. Different generations of IPR professionals, my adviser, myself, and my students, are encountered with difficult challenges during different phases, except that the challenges are of different nature.”20 In the chapters to follow, I further examine how the evolution of China’s political and economic reforms shapes the interaction among different ideas held by different state and societal actors, which, in turn, shapes the outcome of the implementation of IPR norms.
Rationale for Case Selection
Before delving into the empirical chapters, I would like to justify the case selection of this book. Two aspects of the “so what” question are addressed in the following section: Why is China chosen as the specific country under examination? Why is IPR chosen as the specific issue area?
Why China?
According to John Gerring, a case study is “an intensive study of a single unit for the purpose of understanding a larger class of (similar) units.”21 China is chosen as the subject of this study because of its uniqueness and its generalizability.
What comes first is China’s uniqueness: with the world’s largest population and one of the world’s fastest growing economies, China is gaining increasingly more weight in the international political economy. The study of social and political phenomena in China, whose complexity is due a great deal to the country’s cultural, historical, and demographic diversity, is able to enrich our understanding of the social world. Here it is also important to note that, with some exceptions, the implementation of IPR laws in China remains underexplored. To the best of my knowledge, in recent years, there have been only a few scholarly attempts to incorporate elements of the Chinese state, society, and foreign pressure to analyze China’s IPR policy making and implementation in the past two decades.22
Recognizing the uniqueness of the Chinese political economy, researchers should also notice the similarity between China and many other developing and postcommunist countries in the world. Like many other developing countries, in most cases, China regards the unauthorized diffusion of intellectual property as the most efficient way to disseminate knowledge that will eventually lead to economic development and power. As a latecomer to the stage of world economy, China’s foreign economic relationship is often plagued by the country’s disputes with its trading partners over IPR issues. The debates over IPR that China is engaged with have deeper implications for the study of the political economy of the developing world: whether the IPR notion is really helpful to build the developing countries’ innovative capacity and beneficial for their economic development; whether the developing country should comply with the IPR norm in a wholesale manner, as advocated by the developed countries, or should selectively comply with parts of the norm according to its own concrete conditions; and how the interests of foreign investors, domestic companies, and the public should be balanced. Those questions are not unique to China. Recognizing the diversity of the developing world, the conclusions from the study of Chinese IPR policy can help us to achieve better knowledge of other developing countries that are also striving for a higher place in the global political economic setup.
As a postsocialist country, the traditional Chinese approach to IPR is the opposite of the Western capitalist assumption that property rights are the very cornerstone of the establishment of a market economy. Although China has embarked on economic reform since the late 1970s, the notion of protecting intellectual creation as private property remains a hot topic for debate. Although starting from the realm of IPR, those debates have significant implications for the deeper issue underlying the country’s political and economic reforms: whether China should further establish private property as the cornerstone of its market reform, whether private entrepreneurs and literary and artistic creators should have a bigger voice in the formulation of the country’s policy, whether an authoritarian political system can coexist with the call for individual innovation in a sustainable manner, and whether the encouragement of individual innovation can bring about further social and political liberalization in China. Therefore, the theoretical conclusions generated by the study of China’s adoption and compliance with the IPR norms will also deepen our understanding of the political economy in postcommunist polities, many of which are confronted with similar tasks in their political and economic development.
Why IPR?
Since the 1980s, there has been fruitful scholarship on the state-society relationship and its impact on the formulation and implementation of public policy in contemporary China. However, the scholarly community has not studied Chinese IPR policy through the lens of state-society interaction until recently. In international relations literature, much scholarly attention is devoted to the study of de jure compliance. The issue of de facto compliance remains the tricky part, but it is also what makes it the interesting part. Moreover, conventional wisdom holds that the study of IPR is strictly legal and therefore unrelated to the broader study of the political economy. However, I argue that the study of Chinese IPR policy goes beyond the IPR field and has significant theoretical and policy implications.
First, the study of Chinese IPR policy makes substantive contributions to the study of a developing country’s compliance with international norms. As Cortell and Davis argued, two shortcomings in the extant literature on a domestic approach to international norm compliance should be redressed. First, insufficient attention has been devoted to the measurement of a norm’s strength, legitimacy, or salience in a country’s domestic political arena. Second, the mechanisms and processes by which international norms can or cannot attain domestic legitimacy remain underdeveloped.23 Risse et al. also pointed out that “[a promising avenue for future research will be] to study those cases in which formal organizational structure and political culture do not simply reinforce each other, but where tensions between the two appear.”24 Instead of treating IPR as a monolithic set of norms, I demonstrate that they consist of multiple facets and therefore have multiple meanings to different actors. Instead of merely focusing on state actors, I demonstrate that the impact of societal actors is significant although not necessarily so obvious. My study also demonstrates that, instead of existing in a vacuum, the norm of IPR has to be welded with other types of existing ideologies to be internalized in the Chinese scenario. Those ideologies not only reverberate with the IPR norm but also compete with it under many circumstances. My fieldwork with ordinary citizens in China also illuminates the role of the public in a developing country’s compliance with international norms. All of the above not only is relevant to IPR or China specifically but also adds to the general body of compliance literature.
Second, as an interdisciplinary study situated at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, my project also adds to the comparative politics literature, particularly contemporary Chinese studies, by bringing into perspective an understudied policy area. As one of a small handful of political science studies of the Chinese IPR issue, my research demonstrates that Chinese IPR policy is more than just an economic or legal issue. Neither is it only a foreign policy issue. Instead, so many forces are at play during the making and implementation of IPR policy in China, both because of the complex nature of the Chinese political economy and because of the complex nature of the IPR norm itself. The study of Chinese IPR policy contributes to our understanding of some basic themes in comparative politics, such as the interaction between international and domestic politics, political and economic development, and the state-society relationship. Indeed, throughout my fieldwork, a significant number of findings were gathered from my conversations with people on the ground. My interviewees kept urging me to bear in mind the following important questions while studying the Chinese IPR issue: (1) Through the window of Chinese intellectual property rights policy, what can we infer about the achievements
