U.S. Commerce Secretary at Pearl River Delta Conference

Speech by Gary Locke   2009-10-28 00:52:25

In the last few decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have joined the global middle class as China has become a destination for capital, for ideas and for innovation.

We are one another's second-biggest trading partners.  In the past 20 years, U.S. exports to China have increased by a factor of 12; while U.S. imports from China have increased almost 30-fold.

Thirty years ago, Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping chose a small fishing village not far from here as China’s first Special Economic Zone. Today, that village makes up Shenzhen, which boasts a population of 14 million people and is one of China’s most dynamic cities.

There are more than 100,000 factories that make every type of product imaginable – from iPhones and flat screen TVs to cell phones and high fashion apparel.

But we also know that the Chinese economy is increasingly moving up the global economic value chain, where growth is created not just by the power of a country’s industrial might, but also by the power of their ideas and their inventions.

The next critical step is for China to develop more homegrown entrepreneurs that sell high-value and high-tech products here in China and around the world.

A cornerstone of that effort must be a rigorously enforced intellectual property regime

Last year, firms based in Guangdong Province obtained more patents than firms based in any other single Chinese province. Guangdong Province has the potential to be China’s epicenter of innovation.  

In the past few years, China has taken several steps to protect the IP of American and other foreign companies operating within its borders.

For example:

·The Guangdong Intellectual Property Office settled 198 of the 199 patent-related complaints it received.

·There were nearly 2,500 trademark infringement cases of overseas rights holders in China last year, a 35 percent increase over 2007.

Strongly worded IP laws are only as valuable as the civil and criminal penalties people face for breaking them – and China’s enforcement of IP laws is often uneven.

For example, the U.S. government has received reports of occasional aggressive intellectual property law enforcement in Shenzhen, while receiving consistent reports of very lax enforcement elsewhere, including, unfortunately, right here in Guangdong.

In a few hours, I’m going to speak with students and faculty at Jinan University.

Like their American counterparts, many students at Jinan University don’t realize how soon they’re going to be out in the workforce as employees or as entrepreneurs.

And a few years from now, they too will count on a system that rewards those who create products and services that help citizens around the world lead healthier, wealthier and more productive lives.

Only a few years after the American Revolution, our third president Thomas Jefferson helped create the U.S. patent office because he understood two fundamental truths.  He knew:

·That long term economic growth was dependent on a continuous flow of new technologies and new ideas entering the marketplace;

·But he also knew that without a promise of ownership protection for these ideas, innovators would never be willing to take risks to improve upon the status quo.

In today's global economy -- where ideas are just as likely to be discovered in San Francisco as Shanghai – we need to do everything we can to incentivize and empower the brightest minds we have to solve climate change.

And that means we need to create the right protections for ideas.

Somewhere in the world, is the Bill Gates of clean energy, and we need to make sure he or she has similar protection.

Our strength is derived from many sources, but most of all, we owe our success to the ingenuity, intellect and creativity of our people.

The intellectual property reforms I have discussed today are an important step toward helping all our people reach their full potential and solve the problems that challenge us all.

Thank you so much for having me here.

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