Taobao, for those who don't know, is part of Alibaba and it sells products online, much like Amazon. They are at the center of what is an interesting game played only by trading partners who don't get along - China and the U.S. among them.
The U.S. Trade Representative is something most people have never heard of. It falls under the Executive Office of the President and it is is knee deep in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement which is under discussion right now. We don't hear about them very much because it usually isn't doing anything that very many people care about. The one power it has is to label a company as a "notorious" trading partner. This means they do things that our government doesn't like. The Administration took TaoBao off the list of notorious companies because China was making great strides in protecting Intellectual Property.
China is improving its protection of Intellectual Property, if you believe the latest 301 report from the USTR: "The United States welcomes the following important developments in 2014 and early 2015:
• High-level planning documents issued by the Government of China in 2014 and 2015 articulated a commitment to protect and enforce IPR, to allow industry and entrepreneurs a greater voice in policy development, and to allow market mechanisms to play a greater role in guiding research and development (R&D) efforts. China has also continued an ongoing overhaul of its intellectual property laws.... "
TaoBao used to be on that list for selling counterfeit products of a lot of companies [see the complaint at https://www.wewear.org/assets/1/7/040815_USTR_Letter_on_Alibaba.pdf] Now, the trade association of members that make clothes and shoes want them back on. It is hard for us to believe that China has made great strides in anything in IP except getting better at stealing it from every company in the free world. We have to ask ourselves how this kind of thing creeps into government thinking, however liberal the people who work there might be. Can we really think that China is better?
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