WENGANG, CHINA — The first time the pair of Shanghai private detectives came to this remote village known as China's pen capital, they ran into big trouble. They were on a mission, along with provincial police, to raid a factory and seize thousands of counterfeit Parker pens.
They made it inside the building and found the bogus goods. But then a mob of locals arrived, hemming them inside and barricading the only street leading out of town. The detectives escaped with just a few boxes of evidence -- and only after local police intervened.
That was four years ago. Since then, China has adopted more-stringent anti-counterfeiting laws, and knockoff markets in large coastal cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen have been shut down or pushed underground.
But when the same detective firm sent another team to Wengang last summer, it was a similar story. Locals tailed them, and by the time the out-of-towners reached a plant that was making knockoff pens, the factory had cleaned out its supplies. Investigators came away empty-handed.
"We don't have the ability to change the local situation," said the 42-year-old head of the Shanghai detective agency, who asked not to be identified because of the nature of his work.
His frustrations underscore the intractable state of affairs in China's long-running battle against knockoffs. In counterfeit production hubs -- auto parts in Taizhou, cosmetics in Chaozhou, pens in Wengang -- life goes on little changed.
In a survey this year by the Quality Brands Protection Committee, an industry group made up of 164 multinational companies operating in China, 70% said the situation was worse than or the same as before.
Chinese scholars and government officials contend that there's been a lot more progress in protecting intellectual property rights than that survey would suggest. Nationwide, Chinese courts took on nearly 20,000 civil and criminal cases related to such protection last year, up from about 13,000 two years earlier.
"This shows that IPR awareness in China is getting much stronger," said Tao Xinliang, dean of Shanghai University's Intellectual Property School. Yet lack of enforcement, and even collusion, on the part of local authorities remains a major barrier. And few places may be as tough to crack as Wengang.
The town, in southern China's Jiangxi province, has been making writing implements for centuries. Famous calligraphers and poets such as the Tang Dynasty's Wang Bo looked to this place for their maobi, or brush pen.
