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The View | Intellectual property theft: what Chinese and British firms should worry about
- Chinese companies are more vulnerable to data leaks through social media communications than foreign state-sponsored intellectual property theft
- Meanwhile, British companies should discard the belief that transparency buys trust
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
A British scientist, concealing his employment by a multinational trader, gained access to a processing plant in Fujian and obtained critical trade secrets. These profited his company and ultimately stimulated the British economy.
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The scientist was Robert Fortune, the employer was the East India Company, the year 1848 and the processing plant a Chinese tea factory.
Tea manufacturing is convoluted: cultivation, picking, drying, heating, rolling, firing, sorting and packing, with specific methods for each stage. The process had been refined over centuries; outsiders could not discover it by experimentation. So the East India Company cheated.
This story explains why some Chinese believe it is unfair to call China the villain in world intellectual property theft. Everyone does it, they say. But British corporate spying is rare: when it occurs, as in the Matrix Churchill case of 1989, it involves not theft of foreign intellectual property, but gaining access to a coveted market by acquiring knowledge of a foreign tender process or of a rival’s bargaining position.
A famous example of the latter occurred in 2010, when China imprisoned Rio Tinto’s Shanghai boss, an Australian, for theft of commercial secrets.
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