China to Appeal WTO Ruling on Foreign Media Imports

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on August 18, 2009 - 10:55am.

Beijing - China is preparing an appeal of a recent World Trade Organization ruling that found the country is unfairly restricting the import of foreign intellectual property like books and movies, the Associated Press reported.

"We are actively preparing the documents to appeal," Yao Jian, a commerce ministry spokesman, told AP.

The WTO ruling said that China should not force U.S. and other foreign media companies to go through Chinese firms to distribute them in the Chinese market.

"Chinese cultural products have a big deficit in global trade, and their competitiveness is low. So we took measures that fit the Chinese economy and historical cultural tradition," Yao told AP.

http://snipurl.com/qh0nr (DMW previous coverage)

Published in DMW Daily, August 18, 2009

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Comments

Fair to protect and grow the local industry

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on August 18, 2009 - 2:39pm.

While WTO findings are true but the people in China see it in a totally different way. China needs to help spur and grow its local talents and industry especially the entertainment industry. Lets take animations as an example - China is and had been a key OEM 'outsource' hub for animations from all over the world. But China still lacks the creativity to design and produce its own key IP and titles like Korea that's strong and with the ability to compete with International IP such as Disney / Nickelodeon and Cartoon Networks just to name the big 3. Without such help and protection China will forever contnue to be just a factory hub for the world. This is not something that's totally healthy for a country with 1.3 billion people and a growing economy that's the envy of the rest of the world. The Chinese Govt. had introduce various measures and policies, while not many had worked or is in favor or even workable for the local industries, they are trying and changing always + adapting. A good example here will be the Online Games industry - where China had successfully help grow the local games development and brought about several listed companies by protecting and controlling the influx of foreign games titles. http://dragoncalvin.blogspot.com