I am on a “trademark” crusade, so I want to beat this dead horse of a topic again.

If you have not registered your trademark in China (the Chinese translation of your mark, including Chinese characters, pinyin, any proprietary pictures, graphics, etc.), you should not even consider signing any licensing agreement at all. Many China bloggers have repeatedly discussed this topic, and I loathe restating the obvious.

Assuming you have done your homework and registered your trademark with…

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There was a Chinese saying: “no commerce, no evil”. Merchants were thought to be unscrupulous, and commerce was historically considered an ignoble industry in China.

This contemptuous attitude towards businessmen no longer exists in current China. Making money is given …

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Few executives in China, at either Chinese or foreign companies, would be shocked to stumble across a knock-off version of their product somewhere in that country. As China’s trade links to the outside world expand rapidly, fewer and fewer foreign companies are surprised to find a China-produced counterfeit in their home market as well. This sobering reality is, however, tempered by some good news: Companies can take steps to prevent intellectual property…

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There are multiplicities of ways a company can enter China and no single company structure has emerged as the “best” way to enter the market. The more popular investment routes have been through a Representative Office (RO), Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise (WOFE), and Joint Venture (JV).

While historically from 1980s to the late 1990s, most foreign companies set up JVs in China in response to regulatory constraints, WOFE has proven to be more…

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7. China is a large nation of nation-states, much like the EU. There is no single ‘China’ nation, something missed on Westerners.

6. Legal protection may be improving, but observation and enforcement of laws varies province by province

5. Cultural differences under-estimated, as well as…

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