Hugo Bromley & Eyck Freymann: Why China’s Taking of Intellectual Property Matters—and What to Do Now

Beijing broke the bargain that built the WTO. The US and its allies must create new safeguards and agreements.

China’s appropriation of intellectual property is so familiar a complaint that we have almost stopped voicing it.[1] Chinese private firms and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) use many techniques to access IP. They range from nominally legal but coerced joint ventures to outright theft—ignored or neglected by Chinese courts—and industrial espionage by employees at Western firms.[2] The biggest beneficiaries have been technology firms, above all Huawei.[3] For years, Western governments and companies have tolerated China’s behavior as the “price of doing business.” Many firms now central to the AI supply chain, including Samsung and TSMC, have profited enormously from China despite its systematic IP theft. Accepting that anything on the mainland would eventually be stolen, they made copying as hard as possible and tried to use their Chinese revenues to stay a few years ahead of the copies.