Greyscale Legality

The Diverse Landscape of Intellectual Property Law Enforcement in China

By: Qiaoling He

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eBook | 28 November 2025

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Poor enforcement of international intellectual property law in non-Western countries is typically blamed on national-level institutional, political, and cultural contexts. However, there are other factors at play, producing uneven efficacy of transplanted laws within a nation. Greyscale Legality analyzes how and why legal transplants perish or thrive by critically examining the application of international IP law across six industries in China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Qiaoling He investigates widely differing degrees of IP enforcement in areas such as biomedicine, telecom equipment, and film. She argues that laws, as drafted, function on a greyscale of interpretive and operative ambiguity within the industries where they are applied. National settings may not always be supportive of IP law transplants in reducing such ambiguity, but certain industry-specific directives, such as product standardization and network structure, can compensate. Greyscale Legality is an astute study of ways to alleviate legal greyness and generate pockets of legal effectiveness. Its findings can be applied beyond China to other developing countries and other legal areas.