Back in April last year, I spoke at an Economist Magazine Business Without Borders event on China. I mostly spoke about intellectual property protections in China, but my introduction dealt with China’s legal system as a whole. Video of my introduction (but not the whole talk, near as I can tell) is online and was referred to me today. I watched it and liked what I saw and I had it transcribed, per the below.
What I liked is how I try to put China and its legal system in their proper perspective, which is sometimes necessary. It is sometimes necessary because we Westerners too often compare China to from whence we come, rather than to other countries closer to where China is socioeconomically. This causes China to seem worse than it is, and also tends to exaggerate the difficulties in doing business in China.
Here’s my spoken intro, transcribed:
I’m going to start out not really focusing so much on intellectual property, but talking about China’s legal system generally. I’ve been dealing with emerging market countries for the last 20 years or so, mostly helping American companies navigate emerging markets. And my focus in the last 10 years has mostly been on China. In comparing China to other emerging market countries, my conclusion is that China’s legal system is actually more advanced and less corrupt than just about any other emerging market system.
And I’m not the only person who believes this.
As I was driving in this morning I was listening to BBC interviewing a Russian oligarch who was talking about how great Russia is for business, and he mentioned that Russia is actually better than China for business. And the interviewer called him out on that and said well you’re saying that, but no one else seems to say that. And he quoted a number — which I was going to quote today — which is that Transparency International (which is the most respected and the leading ranking of countries on corruption) ranks China 75 out of 176 countries, so it’s actually in the top half in terms of the least corrupt countries. The World Bank ranks China 91 out of 183 in terms of ease of doing business. And in my firm’s own experience, China is not that bad.
We have registered thousands of things with the Chinese government — trademarks, copyrights, licensing agreements — and not once have we ever been hit up for extra money. That’s not true in a lot of other emerging market countries where you do get hit up for a fee to expedite things. But you’re not really being hit up with a fee to expedite things; what they’re essentially telling you is if you don’t pay the fee to expedite your trademark application, your company trademark application is going to go into that “dark corner” over there. And that generally does not happen in China.
Now, just yesterday, the new AmCham China member survey came across my desk. This is a survey of American companies that do business in China, and one of the questions asked of the members who have been involved in intellectual property litigation in China was what their impression was. And 63% of those members said that they were either satisfied or very satisfied. Now to me that’s an amazing number, because here in the United States, the word “satisfied” is usually not a word that’s associated with litigation.
So, I’m not saying China is perfect, it definitely is not and there are major issues there, major issues of corruption, major issues with its legal system, but what I am saying is for the average American company, it’s not that bad at all. And those are the sorts of things I am going to be talking about later.
What do you think?
