The U.S. Is Losing the Intellectual Property Race to China

A foreign policy journal turned down an article arguing that intellectual property belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. The rejection, its authors say, is itself evidence of the problem.

The piece, written by former USPTO Director David Kappos and law professor Adam Mossoff, eventually ran in The National Interest on July 13. It draws on years of bipartisan testimony before Congress and advocacy by the coalition C4IP, Senator Thom Tillis, and former PTO Director Andrei Iancu. The core argument is that Washington has treated intellectual property as a subsidiary concern in trade negotiations while Beijing has elevated it to a strategic instrument.

China's approach is visible in the writings of its leading IP scholar Ma Yide. In recent articles published in China Social Sciences Daily and People's Daily, Ma argued that Beijing should develop its own intellectual property knowledge system, strengthen its international "discourse power," and integrate IP more closely into national development strategy. The proposal to establish a World AI Cooperation Organization in Shanghai fits the same pattern. Beijing is no longer content to apply rules written by others. It wants to write the next set.

U.S. policy remains anchored in an older view. The Phase One Trade Agreement, signed in 2020, repeated demands that China conduct special IP enforcement campaigns. Similar demands have surfaced for thirty years. Kappos and Mossoff argue that the emphasis on criminal and administrative enforcement elevates the state's policing role while doing little to build a transparent civil judicial system. The commitments remain largely unverifiable because the United States has not insisted on corresponding transparency measures, including the publication of judicial decisions, administrative rulings, and enforcement data.