Was there a Chinese Walt Disney?

Published on 7.6.26 in Legal Today

Collective protection of innovation and artificial intelligence reforms intellectual property.

Technology transfers and investments in industrial circulation do not guarantee continuous intellectual property protection. Artificial intelligence and innovation, axiologically, divide rights over intangible assets. Individually, they enhance each other to modernize and scale the protection of creations. Collectively, they incentivize the engineering of smart cities, driven by massive exports of goods and the improvement in the quality of life of their citizens. The tension between these collective and individual values ​​of intellectual property puts pressure on the very essence of technological development, acknowledging the advance of collective protection that we in the West have yet to fully grasp. Smart urbanism and social development in China and other Eastern countries have forged a unique and fundamental collective value for understanding the present state of intellectual property.

Walt Disney World (WDW) Reproductions.

Walt Disney died in December 1966, exactly a decade before Mao Zedong. Collectively, in 1980, China designated its first special economic zone to innovate and develop smart cities like Shenzhen and others, granting subsidies and reducing taxes. For nearly a century, WDW has also received tax benefits and subsidies in its exclusive, futuristic districts. The urban planning success of this regulatory approach ensures the well-being of its communities.

China sent its first delegation to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1973 to define a partnership strategy, which was finalized in 1980. In 1978, it reinstated the Maoist-era regulations on the remuneration of inventions, which granted fixed sums to inventors and declared all patents to be state property. In 1983, it enacted a basic trademark law, paving the way for ratification of the Paris Convention in 1985 and the Madrid Agreement in 1989. In 1984, after decades of nationalizing inventions, China enacted a conventional patent law, partially aligning itself with WIPO's legal framework. In 1990, Deng Xiaoping laid the foundations for the economic and urban development miracle, which attracted massive foreign direct investment, drawn by cheap labor. After eleven years of sustained growth, armed with unprecedented export competition, China joined the WTO in 2001, innocently adjusting its intellectual property legislation to global standards, convincing the world of its regulatory adequacy.

Walt Disney's smart city model (Los Angeles in 1955 and Florida in 1971) became a global phenomenon in Tokyo (1983), Paris (1992), Hong Kong (2005), and Shanghai (2015). A joint venture, 57% controlled by the Chinese government-owned Shanghai Shendi Group, involved adaptations of Disney's creations to Chinese culture, which also went global. The Chinese model is being rapidly exported, as seen in projects like Forest City in Malaysia, built on artificial islands to compete with Singapore, Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia, and the city of Modderfrontein in Johannesburg, South Africa; Gwadar, a port city in Pakistan; Silk City in Kuwait; NEOM in Saudi Arabia; and technology centers in countries such as Russia and Peru.

What opportunities would Walt Disney have taken advantage of in China?

While China only regulated individual aspects of intellectual property under Western pressure half a century ago, its experience in recognizing innovations and classifying its products by determining their social function is thousands of years old.

The earliest trademarks date back to the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BCE), with crests identifying ceramics and weapons. During the Qing Dynasty (1642–1912), designations of origin (biaoji) were already being used to distinguish merchant regions, conferring cultural credibility and reputation, even on medicinal products (hao). Quality distinctions for teas, rice, and liquors were designated by the term "lei." Gonpin was used to designate products reserved exclusively for the emperor.

At the time of Walt Disney's death, Chinese brands distinguished between qualities using the ancient "lei" system. After Mao's death in 1976, the Chinese government considered the 50,000 registered trademarks to be capitalist and bourgeois values; copyrights and patents virtually ceased to exist. 

The construction of smart cities, combining WDW's utopian approach, has been linked to the control of product counterfeiting and technology theft. Indeed, these exclusive zones see more complaints and prosecutions for violations of industrial protection laws than non-subsidized regions of China. In 2018 alone, WDW granted 600 licenses to Chinese companies, making its B2B sales platform network the most developed in the country. All the world's most prominent licenses are regularly held in all of China's smart cities.

Counterfeiting agreements or collective interpretation? Divergences with the public interest. 

Traditionally, we associate intellectual property with the monopoly of ideas for the individual recognition of innovation. Many countries with less intellectual property protection, such as Canada, viewed the ratification of the TRIPS Agreement as merely an incentive for worker creativity. At both the multilateral and national levels, the public interest in intellectual property serves as a temporary safeguard.

Collective interpretation, on the other hand, aims to share intellectual property within a community. Its development in China fostered an unexpected dimension in multilateralism. However, no direct relationship is observed with the influence of human rights, which expanded the use of collective marks in the West as an inclusive version of intellectual property. This influence pits minorities against each other, differentiating their activities from the trademarks and hindering any collective approach to community cultural identity.

IT'S NOT OPEN SOURCE…Artificial intelligence: the cornerstone of collective intellectual property protection? 

If AI serves as the infrastructure for individual innovation, the availability of its data divides intellectual property. By protecting AI-powered creations, we shift their collective value toward knowledge availability.

While G7 governments focus legally on the security of private use of AI data, China, in contrast, directs its collective value toward exporting its technology and bolstering its national security. It amplifies its multilateral presence, observable, for example, in the adoption of the United Nations Resolution of July 1, 2024, which, sponsored by China, links AI to sustainable development and sovereignty.

In its 2025 global AI governance plan, China defines AI as an international public good that benefits humanity, respecting sovereignty and maximizing the global economy with social development. Its industrial application encourages new technology transfer agreements. Point 9 of the plan, the only one to mention intellectual property, states that public sectors must protect it while establishing steps for the security of AI use to enhance public control over data flows. The inclusion of this Chinese AI diplomacy within the multilateral framework of the United Nations worries the United States and Europe, precisely because it could allow China to control the expansion of technology, smart cities, and infrastructure in the Global South.                  

Globalization of the Chinese model of collective intellectual property protection.

China's collectivist culture, as a socialist, Confucian, and Taoist nation, demonstrates its urban innovation and intelligence, fused with the history and utopian vision of millions of people, as seen in WDW. The individual value of protecting innovation is often linked to Christian values ​​such as salvation and human dignity.

In the Analects, Confucius states that those who revive the old can acquire knowledge of the new to teach it. The public domain is based on previous individual creations, allowing them to be shared with the community. This principle also underpins traditional exceptions to intellectual property. Will these become the norm thanks to pressure from China on the West?

In 1919, Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, who dedicated himself to healing through literature after abandoning his medical studies in Japan, published a short story, Kon Yi Ji, which recounts the tragedy of an impoverished scholar forced to steal books to survive. A refined thief, he ends up beaten and begging. The story underscores the simplicity of the scholar by stripping him of the material ambitions of the inventor, while simultaneously condoning the theft of ideas.

It's worth noting that this "Taoism in intellectual property" doesn't alter the rampant consumerism of China's commercial cities, where all the world's brands coexist with local ones, illuminated by drones, and images of skyscrapers adorned with giant LEDs are posted online. Nor does it affect technological innovation in its sophisticated AI labs, subsidized by political and educational institutions. This Taoism has awakened a global legal intelligence where collective and individual intellectual property will coexist in a balanced way, fostering both economic progress and improved consumer quality.

The image of Walt Disney lives on in China, projected onto a giant LED building, because his consumer-quality strategy and his utopia, modeled on parks, cities, and technology dream factories, penetrated deeply throughout the world, influencing urban development in China and creating a collective essence that will regulate the balance between human and artificial intelligence.