by Xinhua author Shi Yang
BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) — In the early days of the founding of the United States, teams of British industrial staff voyaged throughout the Atlantic to succeed in the New World, carrying with them invaluable business secrets and techniques that Britain proudly relied on to take care of its international dominance.
It was blatant mental piracy, a follow the founding fathers of the United States embraced to unexpectedly bridge the hole between the fledgling nation and its former suzerain.
In the Report on Manufactures in 1791, then U.S. Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton inspired foreigners to convey to America “improvements and secrets of extraordinary value,” promising incentives equivalent to monetary rewards and unique privileges.
With the sneaky infiltration of superior mechanical applied sciences just like the cotton loom into the United States, the nation rapidly seized a aggressive edge in manufacturing productiveness and established its industrial empire.
But as American historian Doron Ben-Atar wrote in his e-book “Trade Secrets,” “the United States emerged as the world’s industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe.”
Ironically, such a rustic who initially thrived on theft of technological secrets and techniques is now pointing fingers at China, baselessly accusing the latter of violating mental property rights (IPR).
Nathaniel Fick, U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, reportedly known as for forming a “coalition” to cease China’s so-called “stealing of intellectual property” to advance in synthetic intelligence and different key applied sciences.
The allegation lacks moral grounds. In the misguided mindset of the U.S. authorities, China’s technological and revolutionary developments have been achieved by means of illicit and dishonest means, similar to the American ancestors did.
It failed to acknowledge the truth that China has adopted a distinct and legit path of peaceable growth that includes high-quality opening-up and win-win cooperation.
The IPR rhetoric is simply one of many many disguises that the U.S. employs to hide its actual intention to crack down on rising economies like China, whom it perceives as a possible risk to its financial hegemony.
In the previous when China lagged far behind the United States, the difficulty of IPR was by no means delivered to the forefront by the U.S. authorities. Instead, the 2 international locations used to boast intensive cooperation and communication in know-how and innovation.
But because the hole narrows between the 2 nations, the United States has weaponized IPR to repeatedly smear and assault China, with the goal of curbing the event of the fast-growing financial system.
This conspiracy in opposition to China peaked in 2018, eight years after China turned the world’s second-largest financial system.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump, who claimed that China has infringed on the IPR of U.S. firms, imposed extra taxes on a listing of Chinese imported items and utilized restrictions on the entry of Chinese merchandise into the U.S. market.
The coverage precipitated a devastating loss to U.S. firms and people, the precise house owners of the IPR whose enterprise was intertwined with that of their Chinese counterparts.
In reality, the unilateral allegation of “IPR breach” has been generally utilized by the U.S. authorities in enterprise negotiations with many international locations in addition to China.
But moderately than defend the house owners of IPR, the United States used it as an excuse to blackmail and coerce others into making unwilling compromises, forcing them to simply accept unfair and biased settlements that solely served the U.S. pursuits.
Even a number of the U.S. allies have been on the checklist of victims.
In the Eighties, the United States waged a commerce warfare in opposition to Japan, the second-biggest financial system at the moment with a rising commerce surplus with the United States.
The U.S. authorities accused Japan of insufficient safety and enforcement of assorted types of IPR, together with patents and copyright, which allegedly offered Japan with an unfair benefit within the international market.
Under diplomatic and financial stress from the United States, the Japanese authorities signed agreements with the United States that led to a decline in Japanese exports and made the Japanese market accessible to U.S. merchandise.
Consequently, Japan suffered from the burst of giant financial bubbles and deflation, adopted by a sluggish financial system in the long term.
The groundless accusation of IPR violation displays the out of date U.S. Cold War and zero-sum sport mentality. Desperately clinging to its fading hegemony, the United States views different rising international locations as imaginary enemies and resorts to all means to comprise their development.
The U.S. exploitation of IPR to crush different international locations not solely is ethically unfair, but additionally severely threatens international revolutionary and technological progress, because it impedes cross-border cooperation and technological exchanges.
