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The Surprising Rise of China As IP Powerhouse (techcrunch.com)
hackingbear quotes a report from TechCrunch: China is not only taking the spotlight in strong defense of global markets and free trade, filling a vacuum left by retreating Western capitalist democracies, China is quickly becoming a (if not the) global leader in intellectual property protection and enforcement. And there too, just as Western democracies (especially the United States) have grown increasingly skeptical of the value of intellectual property and have weakened protection and enforcement, China has been steadily advancing its own intellectual property system and the protected assets of its companies and citizens. In addition to filing twice as many patents as the U.S., China is increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation between non-Chinese companies. Why? Litigants feel they are treated fairly. Reports indicated that in 2015, 65 foreign plaintiffs won all of their cases against other foreign companies before Beijing's IP court. And even foreign plaintiffs suing Chinese companies won about 81 percent of their patent cases, roughly the same as domestic Chinese plaintiffs. China's journey from piracy to protection models the journeys of other Western and Asian countries. While building its industrial economies, the U.S. and major European powers violated IP laws with no consideration. As reported by The Guardian, Doron Ben-Atar, a history professor at Fordham University, has noted that "U.S. and every major European state engaged in technology piracy and industrial espionage in the 18th and 19th century." It took Western economies a hundred or more years to change that behavior. China's mind-whipping change is happening over decades, not centuries.
As someone who lives in China and works with western companies that manufacture goods here, I can tell you that the stereotype of copying and low-quality goods is 100% true. Although the article does have nuggets of truth (it was in Beijing's 5-year plan was to patent as many things as they could, then raise the quality of those patents), I wouldn't call China an innovation powerhouse just yet. They have tainted their image and reputation with their antics over the last couple of decades.
America's strength is in innovation and it will always be. When most of us think of innovation here on /. we think of tech (e.g., Tesla, Facebook, Google, etc). But innovation is much broader than that. For example, why does China not see any innovation in the pharmaceutical space? Where are those bleeding edge drugs for HIV, hepatitis C, fibromyalgia? I think you'll see a lot of tech innovation in China because that is largely what they have been exposed to in the last few decades
I agree with your statement that they are as smart as all of us... a large number of highly educated mainland Chinese were in fact educated in the west, including top US universities. It's hard to have respect for the kid who copies your homework, regardless of their intelligence or ability. The defense to this is quite often "every country that ever got rich copied, including the US". True, the US copied Britain, who copied Italy (textiles) and so on. That was 100 years ago, how we regarded and saw IP and hence the law was different. Everyone in the west copied each other, but everyone innovated at the same time. Hence the "revolution" in the Industrial Revolution. I'm sorry that China missed out on that because it was too busy being insular, but it can't leverage unfair competition to catch up.
In 2013 China created a 3-region IP court system to begin enforcement. The law however lags far behind -- for instance, it is virtually impossible to discover an infringing product as there is no legal avenue for this -- you have to illegally plant an investigator inside a factory to catch people in the act. Alternatively, you have to get an official to witness you purchasing an infringing product from the source (which is ridiculous). Meanwhile, they defend local companies that sue the crap out of western companies. They've gotten to the point where they are ready to start pushing their products and services outside of China, so it's not surprising that they will do what suits them -- which is to get serious about IP enforcement. This is the stereotypical Chinese way of thinking in any legal dispute or the like --- there are no truths or ideologies -- you do what suits you and define things in a way that benefits you, even if you contradict yourself later. Sure, every country does this, but China take it to an extreme.
Educational reading:
https://hbr.org/2010/12/china-vs-the-world-whose-technology-is-it
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/chinas-new-rules-ask-tech-firms-to-hand-over-source-code
https://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-products-at-breakneck-speed-and-its-time-for-the-rest-of-the-world-to-get-over-it/
http://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/02/china-nnn-agreements.html
http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/china-product-cloning-and-the-death-of-first-to-market/
http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/02/why-access-to-china-can-be-suicide-for-u-s-companies/