Intellectual Property Protection in China Forew ord Chinese civilization has a long history. The Chinese nation has a vast reservoir of creativity. The brilliant culture created by the Chinese people has exerted a deepgoing influence on the progress of human civilization. Over the past several thousand years, vast numbers of outstanding Chinese scientists, inventors, writers and artists have given the glorious fruits of their mental labour to the development of humanity's common civilization, making enormous contributions. The intellectual property protection system emerged as a product of the development of human civilization and commodity economy and, in various countries, it has increasingly become an effective legal tool for protecting the interests of the owner of intellectual products, promoting the development of science, technology and the social economy, and allowing international competition. As a whole, China, however, for a variety of historical reasons, began work on its intellectual property rights protection system at a comparatively late date. After China started reform and opening to the outside world, it accelerated the process of establishing an intellectual property rights protection system in order to rapidly develop social productive forces, promote overall social progress, meet the needs of developing a socialist market economy and expedite China's entry into the world economy. Since the end of the 1970s, China has done a tremendous amount of effective work in this field, covering in a little more than a dozen years a distance which took other developed countries scores of years, even a hundred years, establishing a relatively comprehensive legal system for the protection of intellectual...
