Greyscale Legality
Greyscale Legality
The Diverse Landscape of Intellectual Property Law Enforcement in China
Poor enforcement of international intellectual property law in non-Western countries is typically blamed on national-level institutional, political, and cultural contexts. However, there are other factors at play, producing uneven efficacy of transplanted laws within a nation. Greyscale Legality analyzes how and why legal transplants survive, perish, or thrive beyond their original contexts by critically examining the application of international IP law across six industries in China.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork in areas such as biomedicine, telecom equipment, and film and television, Qiaoling He investigates how legal texts and industry-specific contexts interact to shape widely differing degrees of IP enforcement within the same nation. She argues that laws, as drafted, function on a greyscale of interpretive and operative ambiguity within the industries where they are applied. National settings may not always be supportive for IP law transplants in reducing such ambiguity, but certain industry-specific directives, such as product standardization and network-based coordination, can compensate.
Greyscale Legality astutely uses Chinese case studies to identify mechanisms that shape the outcomes of global–local encounters, and to develop a theoretical framework that can be applied to other developing countries and other legal areas. Contextual elements can facilitate enforcement by bringing legal texts a more focused interpretation, alleviating legal greyness and generating pockets of legal effectiveness.
This impressively precise analysis will appeal to scholars of law, China studies, comparative politics, international regulation, and business, and its extensive field research will be highly relevant to policy-makers and workers in technology and business.
This pioneering book explores the fascinating concept of ‘greyscale legality’ through a combination of compelling empirical data and an elegant theoretical approach.
With extensive fieldwork and fine-grained description, Greyscale Legality offers rare insight into the complex political economy of China. A lively and interesting read.
Qiaoling He is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Zhejiang University. She is a council member of the Institute of Entertainment Law Research, Beijing, and the recipient of several honours and awards, among them the International Development Research Center (IDRC) Doctoral Research Award and McGill University’s Clifford C.F. Wong Fellowship. Her work on intellectual property laws in China has appeared in Social Problems and the Asian Journal of Law and Society.
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