Opinion | How intellectual property and censorship have haunted a century of China-US trade talks

Ge Chen says the US-China IP protection debate is actually older than the People’s Republic itself. Since the Qing dynasty, government censorship has created the curiosity that allows privacy to flourish

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 10:45am, 7 Dec 2018Updated: 6:58pm, 7 Dec 2018

A Sino-US trade war emerges every few years, and Sino-US trade negotiations have reached a critical juncture yet again. Trade friction between the two nations originated towards the end of Qing dynasty, China’s last feudal government, and persists today. An underlying factor is the Chinese government’s rigorous censorship of imported cultural products, an irreconcilable challenge to free speech in the United States. Over the past century, the US Supreme Court has regularly privileged the protection of free speech against other rights and interests, including privacy and national security.

The First Amendment is also geared towards ensuring equitable conflict between individual speech and government power. The influential case of New York Times Co vs. United States in the 1970s clarifies a fundamental judicial principle: the so-called “state secret” may not erode free speech.

Based on the same idea, the US Constitution defines copyright as an instrument to “promote Science and useful Arts”. For this reason, publication and circulation of books and audiovisual commodities are not only an integral part of cultural supply and consumption, but also, more significantly, a special trade item encapsulating the spirit and value of free speech in the United States.

By contrast, analysts suggest that copyright assumed its primitive shape in China as early as the 10th century, though this protection was equivalent to censorship. Printing technology emerged at that time, and the government aimed to prevent the free flow of information. The words “unauthorised copies will be prosecuted” pointed to compulsory permission granted by the government rather than by authors. After Western powers forcefully knocked open the closed doors of the Qing government to foreign trade, the “copyright” system guided by government censorship confronted a major challenge from the US trade of copies touting the right of free speech.

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