Eight-year old Li Zhenni, a third-grader at Jihong Primary
School in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang
Province, flew 10,000 kilometers from home to the Geneva
headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), to tell delegates from its 180 member states what
intellectual property rights mean to her.
Three and a half years ago. Zhenni, together with 139 other
kindergarten and primary school children, depicted their visions of
science and human development with crayons on a 100-meter scroll of
cloth to mark the world’s first International Intellectual Property
Day.
The Heilongjiang Provincial Bureau for Intellectual Property
Rights organized the activity as part of a campaign to promote
creativity among children and foster their awareness of
intellectual property rights, according to Zhang Xiaowei, the
bureau’s director.
The pictures were later compiled into an album and presented to
the Geneva-based WIPO, which is displaying them in an exhibition
entitled “Creativity by Children: A Chinese Experience,” during the
40th assembly of its member states from September 27 through
October 5.
The WIPO invited five of the young artists, aged between 8 and
11, to Geneva to highlight the exhibition on the first day of the
conference.
“I totally agree with your ideas that IPR awareness building
should start from the children,” said Bernard Kessedjian, chairman
of the WIPO conference. “Children will be the inventors and
creators of the future.”
“And the show itself illustrates the Chinese government’s
initiative in pushing forward IPR protection,” he said.
Ron Marchant, chief executive and comptroller-general of the UK
Patent Office, said that the Chinese practice of building IPR
awareness among the young would be crucial to the country’s
development.
“That is actually what we are trying to do in the UK,”
Marchant?said.
Sha Zukang, Chinese ambassador to the UN in Geneva and head of
the Chinese delegation to the WIPO conference, said a sound IPR
protection mechanism is of vital importance to the nation’s
creativity and development.
“The nation’s hope lies in the younger generation,” said Sha.
“The participation of the youngsters will help imbue a strong IPR
awareness in their minds, which serves as the most effective way of
ensuring a sound environment for intellectual creation.”
When asked to define what intellectual property was, the
eight-year-old Zhenni replied without hesitation that it
represented an “intangible asset” enshrined to “safeguard the
interests of mental creation.”
Chang Cheng, a senior program officer of WIPO, said, “When the
children know they should not infringe on other people’s rights,
and work to protect their own creation from being violated, a sound
environment is well in place to facilitate creation, innovation and
invention, the most powerful wheels that carry the economy
forward.”
(China Daily September 29, 2004)