Please allow me to take your mind on a little adventure! I was just reading A global Chinese software company in the next 20 years? about how China goes about acquiring technical know-how. It’s not quite like what Japan did after WWII, it uses unique aspects of China, such as its size as well as its form of government.

Savio then makes a comment about “[…] piracy rates sky-high and IP legislation and enforcement in its infancy, […]” which I think misses a very important point: China’s government form is of course communist. One of the fundamentals of communism is that there’s no individual ownership of things, most things are *communal* (hence the name “communism” ;-). Wikipedia writes “Communism is a socio-economic structure that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production and property in general.”

Therefore, IP -> intellectual *property* kinda doesn’t fit into China’s picture of the world. So what the US and the media generally completely fail to appreciate (or convey) when talking about this topic, is that it’s not at all about “not enforcing IP”. Very simply, without IP, there’s nothing to enforce!

Open Source is sometimes regarded as IP communism, but from the above you can easily see that it is not – OSS has a strong foundation in copyright law: the GPL, for instance, builds directly onto it and would not work without.

Then there’s the debate over whether communism actually works or not; most implementations tend not to, but some can be quite successful in certain ways (for different reasons). Cuba for instance has done some very interesting things. But China is a special case. It’s been creating its own special mix producing economic wealth as well as power, and I reckon that the “does it work” debate in this case is completely moot. China is such a force that they can pretty much do as they please, and the rest of the world will just put up with it.

Likewise, human rights suck in China, and media freedom is an oxymoron – but they’ve just held very successful Olympic Games and the world has gone along with all the nasties it knows exist.

Right now, the world needs China more than China needs the rest of the world. The other countries have created a huge dependency by outsourcing manufacturing over many years. Shopping in Australia, most things are manufactured in China, even if the company is Australian. This is just a fact right now, whether you like it or not.

So here’s the thing… given the above-sketched picture of China and the world, does China have any reason to change anything in the way it does things? Why would it change its approach to IP?

China uses lots of Open Source software, and has created its own Linux distro and versions of other OSS packages. So it’s getting the benefits from that perspective already.
If you’re building say a website, the key factor is speed and time to market, not IP. In fact, many in “the West” get very distracted by IP (patents generally) and waste a lot of time and money on it, to the detriment of the possible economic advantage in their marketplace. So Chinese might have an advantage already here, they don’t have that “fussing about IP” background and would thus not be hindered by such distracting thoughts ;-)
Building other Open Source software… well, within China, does it really matter? Outside China there’s copyright laws, so there the stuff can be made “safe” anyway with authors’ rights fully protected.

The world seems to work just fine, from China’s perspective? Perhaps this is actually similar to tax(free) havens. They’re regarded as a nuisance when viewed from the outside, but the tax havens themselves and people using them are quite happy with the arrangement. See China as an IP(free) haven! Perhaps, rather than lamenting the lack of IP protection, we can look at how we can use this haven in good and useful ways?