| Abstract | It is sixteen years since China and the United States (US) agreed to provide reciprocal forms of protection for their respective intellectual property (IP). The laws and practices existing in China at the time, largely modelled on the type prevalent in the Soviet Union, in no way matched those in the US. The obligations China assumed under the 1979 Agreement therefore amounted to introducing entirely new types of laws and implementing them as they would be in the United States. It is submitted that the US could do better than continuing to rage against piracy and lack of adequate enforcement ad infinitum and engaging in unending skirtmishes that might tend, contrary to its intentions, to portray intellectual property law as a farce. |
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