WI: Chinese patent system

The Chinese had a system resembling copyright for published works as early as the Song, but they never got around to thinking up a patent system for inventions until 1859 when China had already fallen far behiind.

What would have have happened if China had a patent system earlier?
 
Well, it's not just enough for China to have a patent law; it's also necessary for the Chinese government to be able to enforce said patent law. And arguably, the Chinese state's presence 'on the ground' was never enough to enforce such empire-wide regulations, mediated as it was through the support of local gentry and landowners.

OTL even censorship in the Ming/Qing was troublesome for the state: local magistrates did not perform their work enthusiastically due to the workload involved, there was no national printers' guild or similar organization (unlike England) to help enforce rules, and private printers, sellers and collectors regularly flaunted imperial pronuncements with few consequences. Even Qianlong had to use harsh and political punishment as a threat in order to get the bureaucracy to do its job regarding censorship.

Enforcing patent law would have been an infinitely more complicated task than censorship - patents on agricultural developments would have been vehemently resisted by much of the gentry/peasantry, and similarly so for urban elites for commercial developments.
 
Well, it's not just enough for China to have a patent law; it's also necessary for the Chinese government to be able to enforce said patent law. And arguably, the Chinese state's presence 'on the ground' was never enough to enforce such empire-wide regulations, mediated as it was through the support of local gentry and landowners.

OTL even censorship in the Ming/Qing was troublesome for the state: local magistrates did not perform their work enthusiastically due to the workload involved, there was no national printers' guild or similar organization (unlike England) to help enforce rules, and private printers, sellers and collectors regularly flaunted imperial pronuncements with few consequences. Even Qianlong had to use harsh and political punishment as a threat in order to get the bureaucracy to do its job regarding censorship.

Enforcing patent law would have been an infinitely more complicated task than censorship - patents on agricultural developments would have been vehemently resisted by much of the gentry/peasantry, and similarly so for urban elites for commercial developments.
Neither did their European counterparts,IIRC.I hear a lot about how people stressed that the Chinese government's powerless because it needed the support of gentry and landowners,but until probably the late 18th century,this is also true for Europe.A major reason why there's disputes about raising taxes in England and France during the 17th to 18th century is because the gentry and the nobility was responsible for either collecting taxes for the crown or staffed much of the government positions.In England,they actually rebelled when the King tried to enforce his right to collect taxes arbitrarily without consulting them through parliaments.
 
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Neither did their European counterparts,IIRC.

I wouldn't say the Chinese government was powerless, but my point was that the Chinese state had fewer 'tools' at its disposal than contemporary W European nations to enforce its will, especially on issues such as patents and censorship.

The bureaucracy was not the only way Western European monarchs enforced public policy during this period - they also did it through commercial guilds and corporations. These organizations, which more often than not had state-sanctioned monopolies, brought the commercial interests of merchants in line with the political interests of the state, which meant that not only were merchants not opposing the state, more often than not they willingly did the state's bidding.

To use the censorship example again: in China, if a book was to be banned, the task of doing just that would fall onto the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy would then lean on commercial publishers to stop printing copies. This is, to say the least, a daunting task, especially considering it is rarely in the commercial interest of any publisher to print less books (especially banned books), and so the bureaucracy would have had to act as monitor, judge and punisher all at the same time, with all the inefficiencies that would result.

Conversely in England, if a book was to be banned, the bureaucrats would instead lean on the Stationers' Company, which had a state-sanctioned monopoly over the English publishing industry, to enforce its laws. While it was of course in the Stationers' Company's interest to have its members print more books, it was even more important for the Company itself to maintain its monopoly. So rather than having to do the job themselves, English bureaucrats could conduct censorship with the help of the Stationers' Company and the publishing industry under it, which OTL did happen.

Back to patent enforcement. Like censorship, there will always be commercial incentive for individuals to violate patents, and it's beyond the capability of any pre-modern bureaucracy to monitor them all. National, state-sanctioned organizations relieve the bureaucracy of this burden by incentivizing private industries to comply with state laws or risk losing lucrative monopolies. It would have been impossible for the Chinese state to enforce a patent on, say, woodblock printing; it would be less of a stretch to imagine some hypothetical Chinese Printers' Guild enforcing patent on such things.

So would the Chinese state have been able to develop this sort of national guild organization through which patents can be enforced? Certainly guilds existed in China and in some cases, especially in terms of the Canton hongs, the imperial Chinese state sanctioned their monopoly to achieve political ends. However, by and large Chinese guilds were both local in nature and also largely unacknowledged by the central government (perhaps because of their local-ness), and one could probably assume that Chinese Emperors would not have wanted a national guild organization that could compete with it in terms of power and prestige.
 
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