To address this problem, Dan, Sams & Associates, a Ningbo-based trademark and patent firm, and the Division of International Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) organised a symposium on Intellectual Property protection and enforcement in Europe. The symposium took place on 18 November 2011 at UNNC
and featured presentations by a panel of legal experts from Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK – four countries that collectively account for the lion’s share of Chinese exports to the EU. The speakers outlined the principles of EU and national law governing intellectual property and brought their considerable experience to bear on the latest developments in the field of IP protection in Europe.

The presentations provided an overview of IP rights, covering patents, trademarks, utility type models, copyrights, and trade secrets. They introduced the institutions that regulate IP protection in Europe, e.g. the European Patent Office, and offered practical advice on how to proceed with product registration. Because of inconsistencies in the
development of EU law in this area, the speakers focused extensively on the difference between national and European routes to IP protection. They discussed at length the pros and cons of each route in relation to considerations of time and cost. The presenters dwelled on differences in intellectual property enforcement across Europe, citing numerous cases of IP infringement and how they were handled by the authorities in different EU member states.

The proceedings ended with an interactive session in which members of the audience queried the panel about specific EU directives and customs regulations pertaining to intellectual property. There were discussions of individual cases of alleged IP infringement at trade fairs in Europe and of possible litigation involving Ningbo companies. The symposium thus filled a gap in the knowledge of European regulations and practices that has dogged local producers exporting to the EU market. The event drew scores of participants, among who were entrepreneurs, professionals, and interested members of the public, as well as university staff and students. Its content was suitable for academics and practitioners alike, appealing to anyone with an interest in the application of EU law and its impact on Europe’s commercial ties with China.

For a brief coverage of the event on Ningbo television please visit

www.nbtv.com.cn/video/index.asp?channelid=1&contentid=120111119064700

(fast forward to 15.21) or read next week’s issue of the Ningbo Guide.

from left to right: Professor Mark Kramer (Harvard), Associate Professor James Hershberg (George-Washington University), Dr. Sergey Radchenko (UNNC), Professor David Wolff (Hokkaido)

At the invitation of the Division of International Studies, Professor Mark Kram from Harvard University, Associate Professor James Hershberg from George-Washington University and Professor David Wolff from University of Hokkaido visited UNNC to discuss the always thorny question of open access to archives. Associate professor Hershberg gave a brief overview over the changing public attitudes toward to archive openness in United States, and concluded that the balance between citizens’ basic right to access information and government’s concerns on national security is the central theme. Professor Kram illustrated his opinions by stressing the close connections between openness of information and people’s ordinary life. From sociological perspective, Professor Wolff explained accessibility of information as cultural capital which is essential for citizensihip. The animated discussion which followed the roundtable concerned China’s gradual changing polices on archive openness to recent news about Wikileak’s reveal about secret reports of Iraq War.

The model United Nations conference at UNNC

The conference was modelled a General Assembly session as well as a meeting of the Economic and Social Council, discussing the topic “Should all African conflicts be handled by African countries themselves, and not by the third parties?” inthe former and “Should genetically modified food be banned?” in the latter. For two days, students discussed both topics with a seriousness and expertise which stood not behind the “real” world.

“This conference was the largest one held by our association,” said Fang Chenlin, the president of UNNC Model United Nations Association. “Compared with last three times, we had a better preparation this time and it was the first time that we arranged a campus tour and a city tour during the Conference. This way, the delegates from other universities gained a better understanding of our campus and Ningbo and we made a lot of friends. If all things go well, we expect to hold the Pan-China Conference every year and invite more universities to come.”

For our students, there are numerous opportunities to attend similar conferences. In the past 4 years, the UNNC MUNA has sent students to Peking University, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Foreign Language University, Hong Kong, and Taipei to participate in MUN conferences. Seven exchange students will attend the Model United Nations Conference held in Nottingham UK intwo weeks.

The speakers: Dr. Catherine Goetze (host, left above), Dr. May Tan Mullins (left below), Dr. Robert Lambert (centre), Dr. Peter Lyth (below), Dr. Mathew Humphrey (right)

Overcoming his jet-lag with passionate effervescence, Dr. Robert Lambert from the School of History kicked off the event with an overview over the way the Anglo-American world has developed and exercised environmental thoughts. He unveiled the bicentennial tension and struggle between anthropocentric and ecocentric ideas towards the environment (the former as sustainability/scientific management and the latter as preservationism/radical environmentalism). Those Ningbo students who had experienced his impressive enthusiasm at UoN last year were delightfully thrown back in time by his skilful presentation of “use vs. delight of nature”.

Dr. Peter Lyth, an economic historian from the Nottingham Business School highlighted the development of modern transportation and its impact on shaping modern tourism and human needs for mobility. Dr. Lyth challenged the audience’s received ideas about private car ownership with his argument that in the age of traffic jams and stressfully sickening airt ravel, cars and planes are not about leisure but simply about social status. He pointed out that this offered an opportunity for developing sustainable means of transport as technological innovations may well make trains, urban transit systems and even the bicycle more popular. High speed trains as developed in France, Japan and now China, and smart city transport make the passenger’s experience much more pleasant and, at the same time, have less negative impacts on the environment.

After lunch, Dr. May Tan-Mullins gave the audience no time to fall into digestive sleepiness when she jumped right into discussing the state of environmental governance in contemporary China. Taking the toxic leakage accident in Fujian Province last month as starting point, Dr. Tan-Mullins’s presentation took on the dilemma with which Chinese governments are faced between the two ‘E’s, i.e. economy and environment. In her analysis, the key problem of Chinese environmental governance was the conflict between the central and local governments where even well-meant national policies do not correspond well to local needs. She suggested that more active involvement of international actors is a promising way ahead to improve China’s environmental governance as the international leverage allows designing localised programs such as the Cixi Wetlands Project near Ningbo which was sponsored by the World Bank.

Dr. Matthew Humphrey’s presentation tested the audience’s philosophical capacities as he exposed his explanations of the so-called “American paradox” (but which is not restricted to the US) where polls have shown that people declare to be willing to act against climate change in general but unwilling to take concrete sacrifices such as paying more taxes or replacing their cars with public transport. With the theorems of “rational irrationality” and “rational ignorance” he explained that there were good reasons for people to hold such contradicting views. His brainy, yet detailed and precise anatomy of the social psychology of environmental awareness and action revealed the difficulty of getting the general public to agree to concrete measures of environmental protection.

Following the presentations the speakers gathered at the front of the auditorium to talk with the audience. The discussion was mostly centred on Dr. Lambert’s question to the attending students: how could China’s religious and cultural values help China realise sustainability? The students evoked their learning and experience of China’s traditional value on the harmony between nature and the man, but also expressed pessimism given other overriding concerns such as everyday stress from work and life.

The symposium ended without a concrete conclusion, but it was certainly an enriching experience of thinking and learning. For many participants some of the insights that came during the day were new and enlightening. Issues that are rarely discussed in the Chinese public discourse were brought to the forefront. In contrast to the speakers’ rich account of western environmental history and thoughts, China’s history lies largely to be filled with the young generation’s efforts. A lesson worthwhile to be spread to wider audience. Let’s hope amongst the students present at the symposium would arise China’s John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, Aldo Leopold, one of the “founding fathers” of the Green movement, or perhaps even a Teddy Roosevelt, the 19^th century American president to whom we owe most of the US natural reservations.

For full details of the Student competition which is only open to UNNC students please email Dr. May Tan-Mullins or have a look at our notice board!

In Germany all political foundations but one were inaugurated after World War II and they are since then playing an important role in political education, explained Mr Awe. The rational behind this was the assumption that the lack of civic culture in Germany was one of the main causes of such extraordinary and brutal acts of destructiveness as the killing 6 Million people of Jewish origin and of about another 2 Million people considered “unworthy lives” in concentration camps, or as the launch of the bloodiest modern war with about 55 Million dead. A famous testimony of the hypothesis of political culture was Gabriel Almond’s and Sydney Verba’s study “The Civic Culture: A Study of Five Nations” where the authors found through survey methods that the political culture in Germany, Spain and Italy was less “civic” than in the US or UK.  The study is not only a groundbreaking work of political science which established the dominance of behaviouralist methods in the discipline, it also caused wide-spread debate and critical reflection on complex concepts such as political culture and its influence on state institutions and politics. The authors later revised many of their propositions and findings, and notably attenuated their evaluation of Germany’s political culture (The Civic Culture Revisited) but they still remain THE political science reference for the hypothesis that one major cause for the rise of Nazism was the anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-semitic political culture of Weimar Germany. The list of authors who have, in other ways, explored this idea is far too long to reproduce fully here but the question of mentality, knowledge, ideas and unjust politics has troubled the spirits of philosophers, political scientist, sociologists and historians. A list would include such divers authors like Eugen Kogon (The Theory and Practice of Hell), Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), Theodore Adorno (The Authoritarian Personality), Alexander & Margarete Mitscherlich (The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour), Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power), or the very disputed Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners).

To avoid a repetition of Nazism, political education became a central part of democracy in Germany. Political education is diffused through foundations like the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, through schools where it constitutes an own subject-matter, through the “Zentrale für politische Bildung” which exists on national and federal level and through a variety of organisations and other foundations, of projects and activities like the Children’s Parliament. Even though not explicitly asked a question hanging in the air at Mr Awe’s presentation was: what is the difference between this kind of political education and pure propaganda? Aware of the sensitive nature of the term “political education” Mr Awe set out to explain that two fundamental principle are to guarantee that political education serves the objective of pluralist dialogue: one, the diversity and variety of actors involved in political education, and two, the independence of the organisations.

Just as there are six different foundations which are close to the six political parties represented in the German parliament, there are many more actors who are involved in political education in Germany and they are all non-governmental actors. Even though each of them follows their own political agenda, it is their collective process of exchanging opinions and thoughts, of debating ideas and concepts, and of dialoguing (sometimes quarrelling) over policies and political values that makes political education different from propaganda. The aim is not to prove any kind of ideological supremacy but to explore collectively and to deliberate collectively about solutions to political problems such as social justice, environmental sustainability, economic stability etc. And they can do so because these actors were independent from the government… despite receiving financial funds from the government.

“But what kind of independence can that be?”, asked many students “if you are receiving funds from the government?” The institutional setting of these organisations’ funding is key to understand their independence. The main point of the financial assistance for non-governmental actors through the state is that they receive money not on the grounds that they follow state directives and policies but because they have a legal

Mr Awe taking critical questions from the audience

entitlement to receive money. In the case of the party foundations like the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, they are allocated money according to the number of seats “their” party has gained in the parliamentary elections which are held every four years. The government has to give this money whether the foundations “behaved properly” or not and it cannot cancel, alter or refuse these payments. These payments are entirely unconnected to what the foundations actually do. The money goes into the foundations’ capital for which they are accountable in yearly financial and fiscal audits (after all it’s the taxpayer’s money). But they are not politically accountable for what they do with their funds! No government institution has the right (it’s a law!) to hold the foundations, or any other non-governmental actors they finance for that matter, politically accountable for what they do. Hence, foundations and other non-governmental actors cannot be sanctioned financially for anything they do. That is what independence means: they are legally protected to receive funds no matter what they do or say. That is the rule of law.

Furthermore, foundations such as the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, do not represent particular interest groups. In this way they are different from specific industrial interest groups for instance. Whereas these lobbies (they are called so because their representatives would wait in the parliament’s lobby for parliamentarians to convince them to defend their particular interests) have clear instructions from their stakeholders and defend specific, narrowly defined interests, foundations and many other non-governmental bodies similar to foundations are held by law to work for the common good and the collectivity. They are non-profit organisations which are not allowed to gain materially from their activities.

So, what are they doing then in China? This was indeed the main topic of Mr Awe’s presentation and a central concern of the students who kept on asking for examples of the foundation’s activities in China. The foundation tries to incite, or rather “ignite” as Mr Awe’s favourite expression goes, the same kind of plural debating culture in the Sino-German context. Here too, experiences, ideas and opinions can be and should be exchanged and debated in the transnational and globalised context of today’s world. Germany, Europe and other countries in the world have political models that can inspire China’s political problem solving and China’s formidable experience of rapid economic and social modernization can teach the world. The Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, and by the way other actors in China like the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, the social-democrat German foundation, see their role as facilitators and enablers of such a dialogue and exchange. One way to do so is to enable the “brain circulation” as Mr Awe called this by offering studentships to Chinese student to pursue studies in Germany but also by organising conferences, seminars and roundtables, through book exhibitions and publications, and, last but not least, through visits throughout the country like the one yesterday at UNNC (the full overview over their activities can be here). Our students indeed grasped the opportunity to discuss and debate during and after the presentation, giving a fine demonstration of the dialogue and critical thinking skills they have learnt at UNNC.

Carsten Tietje, Annegret Brandau, Gernot Klantschnig at the Shanghai Half-Marathon

Gernot, Annegret, Carsten and Julie had decided to use this race for charity fundraising, a very British tradition. The runners ask friends, family, colleagues and actually everybody interested to donate money for the team and the team will, if they accomplish their task successfully, pass on those donations to a charity of their choice. If the sportsmen fail their task, there are no donations. The donations are thus a motivation for the runners to go all to the end of their race and it has the wonderful side effect of making the lives of other people better. In this case, all runners accomplished the race (Julie Miles in even less than two hours!), cheered and supported by many colleagues and friends from UNNC, among other Sergey Radchenko from our division. All collected donations will now go to COCOA whose mission is to improve the fate of children and babies in China’s orphanage by providing equipment, medicine and trained staff. If you want to support the UNNC team now and now more about the charity run you can still do so at http://www.justgiving.com/UNNC-Team.

At the same time as Gernot was running through the streets of Shanghai, the Head of Division, Catherine Goetze, was mobilizing against AIDS at the UNNC Youth Volunteer’s Association’s “Take AIDS seriously, respect LIFE sincerely” campaign. In the icy wind around Wanda Plaza, the YVA had arranged for a formidable show. The UNNC cheerleader team started the action with their great stunts which attracted a larger public. Followed speeches from representatives of Yinzhou District and of Catherine Goetze, and with games for the public to inform and discuss about AIDS.

"Take AIDS seriously, respect LIFE sincerely" campaign at Wanda Plaza

The relatively low incidence of AIDS and the fact that anti-retroviral therapies are now saving more and more lives should not make people believe that AIDS is a disease only others get, Catherine warned. The disease continues to spread and is touching now also low-risk populations as information and prevention are still not sufficient to make people stop taking risks. AIDS is a sexually transmissible disease and everyone having sexual relationships (and most adults do, don’t they?) can get infected. The full text of the speech can be found here. UNAIDS has just published its annual report on the state of HIV and AIDS in the world with a well-researched section on China: http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/HIVData/EpiUpdate/EpiUpdArchive/2009/default.asp

While Gernot and Catherine were fighting the cold winds of China’s beginning winter, May Tan-Mullins was off to Bali where she is participating in a meeting of the National Bureau of Asian Research (http://www.nbr.org). Let’s hope that there is as much work as sun, otherwise we would all have to get jealous for such a great conference location…

Participants, organisers and students before going off for dinner

The Division International Studies successfully held its first international conference last week from 16-18 September. Scholars from China, Germany, Turkey, USA, Taiwan, Japan and India discussed China’s place in the world after 30 years of reform. In eight panels and one roundtable discussion the participants discussed various aspects ranging from China‘s foreign policy and standing in the world to its economic reforms and internal institutions. General agreement emerged on the progress China had made not only in bringing prosperity to its population and lifting large parts of the population out of poverty but also in reforming its institutions and governance. Yet, it also became clear that in many aspects challenges persist. The panel „Security in East Asia“ focussed on China’s relations to its Asian neighbours and present-day questions of China’s foreign policy: Beijing’s leadership potential in the international sphere, prospects for regional integration in East Asia, and China’s approach to UN peacekeeping.

The panel on “China and the global South” concentrated on the country’s growing engagement with the developing world, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Panellists highlighted the economic, political as well as normative impact China has had on different parts of Africa, specifically in terms of foreign direct investment and development models. In the subsequent discussion key ideas underpinning the Sino-African relationship, such as the Beijing consensus of socio-economic development, were critically contrasted to the reality of Chinese engagement with Africa.

The questions related to China’s new role in international politics continued to be the topic of the second day. In the fourth panel on China and international trade, two lawyers (Chieh Huang from UNNC and Pasha L. Hsieh from the Singapore Management University) presented papers assessing the roles of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In particular, the abilities of the organisation to resolve trade disputes and the mitigation of its rather difficult relations with China were discussed critically. Issues of censorship and intellectual property rights were also highlighted during the intense question and answer session.

The papers for the panel “China in Global Governance” were engaging and raised a number of interesting propositions. They interrogated the opportunities and challenges of China’s new role within the global world and highlighted a number of overlapping, intertwined debates that served to demonstrate China’s inextricability from its position as a significant world actor. Joel Wuthow’s paper ‘Deliberating Peace: China, strategic choice and the politics of collective security’ explored the intricacies of why China acts both in a cooperative manner and ‘indifferent’ or disinterested player within the Security Council. The paper points out the strategic reasons and norms driven behaviour of China’s action on the world stage signifying a willingness to engage as a responsible world player but occasionally punctuated by political realism of states. Nadine Bosse’s paper ‘China within global governance’ equally examined how China’s role has evolved through an examination of its interaction with NGOs, INGOs and on another level how regionalism and internationalism has shaped and been shaped by China’s conscious engagement. May Tan-Mullins, Giles Mohan and Marcus Power’s paper ‘Redefining ‘Aid’ in the China-Africa context: Global Governance, Chinese modalities and local Impact’ explored the effect of China’s engagement with Africa through the prism of aid. The paper highlights the competing perception of ‘good cop-bad cop’ in the realm of developmental aid and how China has sought to redefine this field as a ‘value free’ realm. Relatively, while the papers did have some superficial weaknesses, they managed to collectively highlight and demonstrate an undeniable influence China has gained on the global stage and how it has exercised this influence to the extent that it has.

In the afternoon the so-called peaceful rise of China and its complicated joggling between the US and the EU came to the foreground. Xin Li and Verner Worm from the Copenhagen Business School defended the concept of soft power to better understand how China can use its economic strength to influence world politics. Notably the attraction of China’s economic success should be used more to strengthen China’s position in the world. Abigail Greenwald from the German Society for Foreign Policy analysed the reasons why the US and the EU struggle both in developing consistent approaches to China. She emphasized that, even though the reasons for inconsistency were different, China managed in both cases to take advantage of these inconsistencies and to play one US agency against another, or one EU member state against another. She ended with a plea to more coherence within the EU and US policies towards China but also a closer collaboration between the two actors in order to enable a more constructive dialogue with China.

In how far China’s foreign policy is driven by more general concerns for world affairs or by national interest alone was only one of the questions debated at the afternoon’s roundtable, the highlight of the conference. The roundtable was introduced by a keynote address by Alexander McLachlan from the Delegation of the European Commission in Beijing. McLachlan emphasized the need of a pragmatic approach in European and American politics in order to work together with China in solving major global problems. He critizised scholarly debates for easily drawing up smoke screens behind which essential political problems like that of environmental change are concealed. He made three concrete suggestions on how to model China’s relations with the West, namely to encourage Chinese politics in its international socialisation process and “to play by the rules”. He emphasized that China was living through two processes at a time: opening up and internationalizing on the one hand, and renegotiating its internal identity. The world had an interest in and an obligation of supporting China in this double process.

The question where we are in this process was consequently one of the main themes of debate on the roundtable in which Mr McLachlan, Professor Richard Balme from the Public Policy Program of Peking University and Sciences Po, Dr. Joseph Askew and Dr. David Kiwuwa participated and which was chaired by Dr. Catherine Goetze, Head of the Division International Studies at UNNC. Particularly the question of development and if and how far China constituted an alternative development model provoked controversial debate. Even though there was a general consensus that China had gone a far away in the past 30 years, particularly with respect to poverty alleviation and overall prosperity, doubts persisted if the Chinese way could be transposed to other areas of the world, or even if there was a thing like a “Beijing consensus”. On the way other topics closely related to this one were addressed like Western perceptions of China’s identity and nationalism, China’s colonial past, and the need for China and the West to collaborate closely to solve global problems. Students of the Division participated lively in this debate and were the pride of their lecturers.

The panel on “Institutions and Politics in China” the next morning brought together three different papers.  The first from Lili Hernandez on the dilemmas and misunderstandings of foreigners in China provoked a lively debate.  Caixiang Duoje, from Qinghai Normal University, gave an excellent paper on the problems and progress of education for ethnic Tibetans in the province of Qinghai.  Gerald Roche, also from Qinghai Normal University, presented a very interesting paper on the impact of globalization on Qinghai’s Mangghuer and their version of the Nadum festival.  Both these papers resulted in an extended and stimulating discussion that threw much light on an unfairly neglected part of Inner Asia.

The two papers presented in the subsequent panel on ‘China’s Rapid Social Change’ reflected on the social diversity and conflict that has emerged as a result of the post-1978 Chinese reforms. The paper of Frido Wenten’s (Free University of Berlin) described how the economic transition from state (socialist) to private (capitalist-like) economy reshaped the Chinese urban and rural working class, while also depriving it of the basic benefits previously associated with a socialist economy. Meanwhile, the paper of Jeanette Barbieri (Hollins University, USA) and Li Nan (Chinese Academy of Social sciences) highlighted the effort of the authorities to create an image of national unity (at a time of emergency) of a society in fact increasingly divided along social and ethnic lines.

The two papers gave us an insight in the top-down effort of the Chinese authorities to compose social conflict in the name of social harmony, on the one hand, and the bottom-up response – both positive and negative – from society itself, on the other hand. Wenten’s paper showed the new, officially acknowledged role of the trade unions as agents of negotiations between workers and their employers, including owners of companies with foreign capital, to channel post-reforms workers’ discontent and limit their exploitation in view of maintaining social order and political stability. Barbieri and Li’s paper counter the official imagery of national heroes of the earthquake used in the official exhibitions on that natural disaster with alternative and often less harmonious images and interpretations offered on internet.

An interesting part of the papers was the reference to the new and old means of communication used to express views and opinions. This ranged from the evidently still strong reference to the older tradition of socialist realism in the official iconography of heroism in the case of the heroes of the earthquake to the newest tools offered by globalization (internet in the first place) , to either support or contrast official voices.

The conference concluded on a final panel session about China’s economy, chaired by Qing-Ping Ma from Nottingham University Business School in Ningbo. First, Jack Marr from NYU Stern in Shanghai presented his analysis of Shanghai’s chances to outwit Hong Kong as financial hub in Asia. His cautiously optimistic analysis that Shanghai did represent some strengths that would allow in some distant future a strong standing of its stockmarket was well complemented by Michael Panton’s (Syracuse University) analysis of the state of China’s banking sector reform. In both cases, it became clear that the existing system was not sustainable even though it has held China out of the current financial world turbulences. Panton did see some encouraging steps of banking sector reform, however, he made clear that a complete liberalisation and independence hinged on prerequisites like the rule of law (and the rule by law), RMB convertibility, the tidying up of bad loans etc. which were still not foreseeable for the near future.

The conference was of course about more than just academics. In the evenings, participants made the trip to Ningbo’s fashionable Lao Waitan district where they wound down in the riverside cafes against the backdrop of the city’s spectacular skyline. The closing dinner in the Four Seasons Hotel was an occasion to sample local culinary delights and celebrate Catherine’s birthday with Chinese cake. We hope that everyone had a fantastic time and hope to welcome you back at UNNC in the future.