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8 Queen Mary J. Intell. Prop. 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/qmjip8 and id is 1 raw text is: Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 1 2 Editorial On 24 October 2017, the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress concluded in Beijing. Held every five years, this historical and highly anticipated event has not only ushered in leadership and policy changes, but has also sent a strong message to the outside world that China is eager to assume greater world leadership. Today, no country can attain leadership without strengthening its economic development and technological capacity. Although China was backward when it was re-opened to the outside world in the late 1970s, the past three decades have seen the country making breathtaking progress. Based on the statistics provided by the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), in 2016 China processed nearly 3.5 million patent applications, including over 1.3 million applications for invention patents. Foreign analysts generally find internal government data suspect. Nevertheless, the SIPO statistics have been corroborated by data compiled by international organizations. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, China was ranked third and fourth in the world in 2016 based on inter- national applications through the Patent Cooperation Treaty and under the Madrid system, respectively. For that year, the European Patent Office also reported that about 15 per cent of its patent filings originated from China. Notwithstanding these impressive statistics, policymakers, commentators and industry leaders continue to criticize intellectual property laws and policies in China - at times heavily. For example, they lament how the Chinese patent system has focused more on quantity than on quality. In August 2017, the US Trade Representative also launched an investigation on China under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. This ongoing inves- tigation targets the country's laws, policies and practices in the areas of intellectual prop- erty, innovation and technology development. When these two diametrically opposed views are considered together, the debate on intellectual property developments in China strongly resembles the debate on whether the proverbial glass is half full or half empty. Having a highly polarized debate is indeed common with respect to law and policy discussions on China - both within and outside the intellectual property field. Whether the focus is on improvements or disappointments will largely depend on one's perspective. What is often overlooked in the debate, how- ever, is what type of water this proverbial glass contains. To help us examine the rapidly changing Chinese intellectual property landscape and to take stock of the country's many important historical developments, this special issue brings together leading scholars in the field. Some of the contributors originated from the Sino-Finnish comparative research project on 'Legal Transplant for Innovation and Creativity', from which the idea of this special issue emerged. That project was jointly conducted by the Hanken School of Economics and the University of Helsinki in Finland and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Shenzhen University in China. To ensure full coverage of the issues involved, the line-up of contributors has since been expanded. This special issue opens with an introductory article exploring what it means for the Chinese intellectual property system to hit 35. Will this system approach its prime or will it face a hard-to-predict mid-life crisis? Professor Ken Shao of the University of Western Australia then shows provocatively why the neoliberal capitalist view of the global intel- lectual property regime fails to explain the design and implementation of the strategic patent framework in China. Professor Li Mingde of Tongji University follows with © 2018 The Author Journal compilation © 2018 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 2JA, UK and The William Pratt House, 9 Dewey Court, Northampton MA 01060-3815, USA

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