Although millions of patents and trademarks have been registered in China, Professor Chen Meichang of Peking University's Intellectual Property Teaching and Research Center says that the country still has a long way to go before reaching intellectual property prosperity.

Chen says, "China is still inferior in per-million intellectual property ownerships." According to data from the World Bank, in 1998 Japan had 2,837 patented items per million people, the highest number in the world. America, with 518, ranked eighth; and China had 11, putting it in forty-eighth place.

A country's innovation capacity is usually measured by the number of articles published in the Science Citation Index (SCI). According to UNESCO's World Science Report, China only accounted 1.6 percent of the published documents listed in the SCI. India accounted for 2.1 percent and Western Europe, 35.8 percent.

Moreover, China's ratio of research cost to technical output is only about one-third the world average.

In 2000, the nation's investment in technology innovation accounted for 1 percent of its total GDP, less than half the world average. The number of research workers and engineers per 10,000 was a mere five, far below the 33 of the developed countries.

"The number of published articles in the SCI and the volume of applied patents are both too low considering China's population and economic status. In general, China is neither a knowledge creative country nor a technologically creative one." Chen said. "To change the tide, a national intellectual property strategy must be established."

(China.org.cn by Li Liangdu June 22, 2004)