It's hard to enforce any kind of IP protection in China. Some years ago I worked for a company that outsourced some PCB layout and manufacturing to a reputed co

It's hard to enforce any kind of IP protection in China. Some years ago I worked for a company that outsourced some PCB layout and manufacturing to a reputed company in China. A few months into production we were made aware of similar devices with identical error codes and messages being sold locally. We had no luck prosecuting it. Their IP system is strange in that you can file a patent in China even if there is prior art and is being used elsewhere in the world. This means you see interesting incidents - a patent we filed some years ago with apparently little to zero commercial value suddenly popped up in China, filed by some company from Shenzhen. It was apparently a word for word copy of what we had filed, and the diagrams were identical too. Though there are tall claims about how IP protection has "improved" in China, they have a long way to go and a lot of broken trust to rebuild.