Diplimatic Courier
In December of 1995, an American delegation under USTR Mickey
Kantor travelled to the People’s Republic of China to continue
negotiations with regard to the lack of enforcement of American
intellectual property rights in China. While staying in Beijing, one of
the U.S. negotiators visited a Chinese store to buy some shampoo. After
purchasing what he thought was a bottle of Procter & Gamble shampoo,
he later discovered that the bottle contained a high concentration of
lye and was not a Procter & Gamble product at all, but simply a
bottle with a pirated label.
To say in 1993 that manufacturers and markets in the People’s
Republic of China were infringing intellectual property rights would be
an understatement. The development of increasingly sophisticated
counterfeiting techniques combined with the growth of the Chinese
economy and international trade “fueled piracy on a scale never before
witnessed.” Despite previous efforts going as far back as 1980 by the
Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to negotiate an
agreement on IP rights, blatant violations continued in the PRC not
because the Chinese statute books lacked the laws to protect such
rights, but rather because the government was unwilling to carry out any
enforcement of those laws.