When I was in the taxi this morning, I heard the news from the radio saying in order to protect Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Xiangyang market will be completely shut down soon.
It said 80% of fake or copied commodities that were found violating IPR come from Xiangyang market. The Shanghai government is making great effort to contribute to support IPR.
Xiangyang market is well-known both in China and overseas - that makes it "the targeted place" when it comes to pirated goods crackdown campaign. In Chinese we have a phrase to describe the same situation 众矢之地。
But what would happen after the close-down? What would happen to those vendors in the market? Would they willingly give up their job and profit? I guess lots of the vendors might go underground - keep running their business secretly. They might start to do direct sales - going to knock at people's doors or offices, ringing up people or steal customers from the real brands retail shops by standing outside just like those underground foreign currency traders (who stand outside or even inside of a bank buying or selling foreign currencies!)
My assumption is it will take longer time to get rid of all the pirated products and their makers. When you notice there are less people carrying LV bags in Shanghai/China and you can't buy a DVD for 6 RMB, it is time that IPR protection has actually improved.
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