US-China intellectual property trade wars

This chapter examines the United States' use of trade threats, trade wars and other coercive tactics to strengthen intellectual property protection and enforcement in China. It begins by recounting the trade threats exchanged between the two countries in the early 1990s. It then explores the United States' use of a new-found strategy in the mid-2000s: the WTO dispute settlement process. Noting the United States' mixed success with that process, this chapter turns to the ongoing US-China trade war, which began during the Trump Administration but has continued into the Biden Administration. The current US approach combines the coercive tactics used more than two decades ago with the newer strategy of WTO dispute settlement. The chapter concludes by identifying eight lessons that we can draw from trade threats, trade wars and more broadly the use of coercive tactics to strengthen intellectual property protection and enforcement in China.