Recently I signed up with Wanfang, China's public "pay-to-read" portal for academic papers. The site is easy to navigate and sophisticated in function, with bibliographies, citation statistics and buttons you can click to share an article using social networking sites. Someone has invested some serious money and the site is poised to become a marketplace for research papers in China.

The "pay-to-read" website for research papers helps to illustrate how far China has progressed in protecting intellectual property over the past few decades.

China's progress in protecting intellectual property rights has been marked by several milestones, such as China's joining of the World Intellectual Property Organization and other world conventions, as well as the signing of bilateral agreements with individual countries on the matter. Most of these agreements were signed in the 1980s and 1990s when China was struggling to convince skeptical observers that efforts were under way to protect international intellectual property.