Professor Zheng Shengli, Dean of the Intellectual Property Rights School at Peking University, recently made a surprising admission about the state of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in China. At the recent Forum on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Higher Education, Professor Shengli admitted the numbers of needed IP experts will fall short by the tens-of-thousands for the foreseeable future.
Several obvious reasons exist for this lack of IP professionals. In brief, the staggering growth the Chinese economy has sustained in the last few years, especially in sectors that deal directly with Intellectual Property, such as technology, software and various aspects of electronic media, like creation of CD's and DVD's has spurred the need for knowledgeable advice on typical issues. Further, as China has become the chief venue on the globe to cheaply create the inventions of other countries, it has dealt with every conceivable aspect of the ownership, licensing and the use and misuse of the patents of other countries.
To sum up the problem, Chinese universities and law schools have simply not produced the number of IP and IPR professionals necessary to keep pace with the needs of the fastest growing and most dynamic marketplace in the world. By the year 2010, China's voracious economy will need the guidance of between 55,000 and 60,000 IP experts. Professor Zheng claims these numbers are based upon his research into "internationally accepted standards and the practice of multi-national corporations" that shows the ratio of IPR professionals to Research and Development (R&D) workers ought to be somewhere between 1% and 4%. Since China had 3.284 million R&D scientific workers nationally in 2004, the ratio suggests there should be at least 32,800 IPR professionals. But, currently there is less than 10% of this number, or about 3,000 IPR professionals that have matriculated from Chinese universities in the last decade, since the topic has been ignored by the situations, according to Dr. Zheng. The number of IP trained professionals will be 20 times the number employed today, an inconceivably large gap.
What will be the results of this massive shortfall in an area of expertise already missing 90% of the global standard for the profession? Xie Xiaoyong, development director of Research and Development Center of the State Intellectual Property Office, which was the co-organizer of the forum, says, "The shortage of IPR professionals will hamper the development of IPR protection, which will consequently slow down the progress in scientific and other related research areas. China's economic development will also be curbed as IPR has been an increasingly important factor in the global economy, if the shortfall continues."
Beyond this, a great deal of ink has been spilled over the massive violations of IPR's the last few decades which has occurred in China. These IP violations have not simply robbed owners of rightful rewards for hard work, but also have impoverished global commerce and the sector of the Chinese economy dealing with developing inventions and IP.
What is China doing currently to deal with this problem? Recently, many Chinese universities have begun master's and doctor's programs in IPR, in response to the shortage of IPR professionals, and 18 universities have created IPR education and research institutes The first was Renmin University, which created an IPR education and research institute in 1986, and the next year began a legal program in IPR law started, which was the beginning of scholastic education on intellectual property rights in China.
Is there anything else that can be done to address this problem of the lack of IP experts in China? Well, the lack of expertise gives ambitious Western IP students and professionals a bigger opening to get a leg up in the global IP world. Clearly, an enormous need exists that will not be met anytime soon by internal Chinese sources. So would a Western IP expert be accepted in China? Several strong reasons lead to drawing a positive conclusion to this question.
First, a deep and long-standing need for expertise exists. Second, the state IP regime has stated quite clearly that its official policy is to accept a global standard on IP & IPR's, as represented by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and other related groups and treaties. And U.S. and European trained IP experts are well-versed in these standards, since they created them. Third, the law of China can be learned well-enough to be able to understand the cross-jurisdictional legal issues, by a Western lawyer or IP expert. Fourth, as to a language-gap, there many professionals in China that speak English, and there are also a lot of highly trained translators. So the opportunity to work in China in the important field of IP exists, and can certainly be had under the right circumstances. In fact, there are already thousands of Westerners living in China, doing the same thing in other market and educational areas.
One conclusion is unavoidable and which reaches to the top of the Chinese state hierarchy. A main reason China may have a hard time following global standards in Intellectual Property may have more to do with the lack of professionals working and teaching on topic in the country, and a historic absence of the idea in education or as an economic value, than any other reason. In other words the problem could be more of education than will. Western IP experts going to work in China might be able to bridge a gap in IP & IPR compliance that politicians, sanctions, businessmen and lawsuits have yet to be able to cure.