| Comprehension - Passage 3 |
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(Adapted from an article by Craig Simons in the South China Morning Post, 10 January 2005)
Read the following article and then answer questions 1 - 14. Choose the best answer for each question. |
| Faking it |
| 1 |
Liu Yang, a 35-year-old woman with long, curly hair, pointed to a small apartment abutting Beijing's
Silk Alley, a pedestrian lane in the city centre lined with stalls selling counterfeit brand-name clothing,
shoes and accessories.
If customers wanted to buy fake Beijing Olympic T-shirts, she said on a bitterly cold January morning,
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| 5 |
that was where she took them. Inside, stacked in flimsy cardboard boxes, were dozens of shirts
bearing the Olympic rings and phrases like "New Beijing, New Olympics", each selling for a few yuan.
A month ago, Ms Liu didn't dare sell the shirts at all, but after more than a decade as Beijing's most
visible location to buy pirated goods - from Nike shoes to Rolex watches and North Face jackets - Silk
Alley has closed.
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| 10 |
"We all have to stop selling," she said. "I need to empty out my inventory". Even so, she was still
careful.
According to vendors, the government relaxed enforcement during Silk Alley's final days, allowing
merchants to clear backlogs of name-brand goods like counterfeit Adidas shoes, sales of which had
been banned for several months.
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| 15 |
But, Ms Liu said, even during Silk Alley's final days, officials prowled the market for merchandise
bearing Olympics symbols. "If the police catch me selling the T-shirts," she said, "they will seize them
and fine me. They are very serious."
That level of commitment toward stamping out piracy is something business executives around the
world would like to see more often. According to the US government, China has been the world's |
| 20 |
number one producer of counterfeit goods since 1998. They report that 66 per cent of pirated goods
seized at US borders last year originated in mainland China.
Add in Hong Kong, a stopping point for many mainland Chinese exports, and that number rises to 75
per cent. US Assistant Secretary of Commerce William Lash said in Beijing last August that the trade
in counterfeit merchandise accounted for roughly 7 per cent of global commerce and each year cost |
| 25 |
legitimate companies worldwide about US$50 billion.
He said the world's second-worst offender, Russia, paled in comparison to China, costing American
companies US$1 billion a year, or 5 per cent of what Chinese fakes cost. "Piracy has gotten to
epidemic levels," he said.
Chinese officials do not deny there is a problem. Instead they point to a number of reasons why they |
| 30 |
have had trouble beating the counterfeiters: the country is poor and government resources are
scare, the economy is too big to police effectively, and overseas demand is driving the trade.
But, manufacturers counter, protecting intellectual property is also a matter of national will. Nothing
offers a better example than the job Chinese officials have so far done to protect the Olympic
symbols. Since China won the right to host the 2008 Games three years ago, they have passed a
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| 35 |
series of national laws protecting copyright of the Olympic images and more than 100 phrases like
"Green Olympics", "Hi-tech Olympics" and "People's Olympics" that the city will use to promote the
Games. They have conducted a national public education campaign encouraging citizens to turn in
offenders, and have ordered commerce ministry officials to seize pirated Olympic merchandise.
In a month-long crackdown on fake Olympics advertising shortly after Beijing won its bid to host the |
| 40 |
Games, officials tore down 690 billboards that illegally associated products with the event, and ripped
fake Olympic emblems off 67,000 taxis.
Liu Yan, deputy director of legal affairs for the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee, said that
officials had prosecuted thousands of cases across the country. "China has made many promises to
the International Olympic Committee and the world," he said, adding that so far China's protection of
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| 45 |
Olympic intellectual property had been much better than was ordinarily the case in China.
Executives are sure to point out that the successes mean that with the right level of commitment,
China could do better job. Lawyers working on the mainland said one of the biggest problems for
firms trying to stop the trade in counterfeit products was that while most developed nations enforced
intellectual property rights with strict law mandating prison sentences and heavy fines for offenders,
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| 50 |
in China penalties were relatively light.
Douglas Clark, a partner at law firm Lovells' Shanghai office, said that last year about 1,000
intellectual property cases were tried in Chinese criminal courts. "In China, that's a drop in the
ocean," he said.
Another problem is that because of local protectionism, it is often only the people who sell
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| 55 |
counterfeit goods - mostly uneducated migrant laborers earning a meager living - who are caught. In
one recent case, US lighter manufacturer Zippo spent millions of dollars to prosecute a factory
making counterfeits in coastal Zhejiang province. Their efforts led to the seizure of 75,000 counterfeit
Zippo lighters. But an official at the US Embassy in Beijing said that before Zippo lawyers could
prosecute factory management, evidence held by the local government was destroyed. The problem,
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| 60 |
the official said, was that investigators in China rarely looked "up the food chain", instead just getting
"the people that are most easily replaces."
The Beijing Olympic Committee's Mr Liu said his office had stepped up protection by increasing
penalties - fining copyright infringements at up to five times the amount of illegal gains and
prosecuting more frequently in criminal courts - and by going after producers. "We have to get them at |
| 65 |
the source," he said. "Otherwise there will always be more sellers."
Realising that China is too big to police administratively, Mr Liu's office has also taken out television,
radio and newspaper advertisements calling on citizens to buy only genuine Olympics merchandise
and to report piracy. "If we only rely on the authorities, it's hard to have effective enforcement," he said. |
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