chinese customs authorities are redoubling their efforts to curb counterfeiting, especially by "annihilating infringement at the source of origin," a senior official said yesterday.
 
the lack of awareness of ipr protection among chinese firms has made it easy for them to be deceived or lured by foreign traders into making and exporting counterfeit goods, said gong zheng, deputy director of china's general administration of customs.

this is especially a problem at a time when a rising number of enterprises are engaged in "original equipment manufacture" (oem) and exports in china, which is touted as the "world's workshop" by some traders, gong told a press conference in beijing.

"so in addition to cracking down on infringements, we have laid emphasis on disseminating ipr protection knowledge among firms to nip infringement activity in the bud," gong said.

many oem enterprises are asking customs for help to check the status of iprs when they receive orders from foreign businesses, he said.

the official said chinese customs is among the few in the world that offers ipr protection not only for imports at the border, but also for exports.

the customs is doing its best to knock down the number of counterfeit goods slipped to countries including the united states and france.

in response to a china daily question on whether lax supervision had resulted in a large number of counterfeit goods reportedly seized at us and french ports, gong said the quantity was "relatively not so serious."

in the us case, for example, authorities claimed that seizure of chinese exports that infringed upon iprs was valued at us$63.97 million last year. the figure was huge in absolute volume, but it represented only 0.04 per cent of china's total us$162.9 billion exports to the us, according to gong.