Recently I signed up with Wanfang, China’s public “pay-to-read” portal for academic papers. I have some papers of my own listed. Readers can pay RMB3.0 to view any one of these papers. One of them, for instance, is related to performance improvement for teachers new to distance education in the United States. I do not know why the general public would pay to read it when in the past I thought I should be paying them for the favor of finding it out as such works are not highly valued.

The site is fairly easy to navigate and sophisticated in function, complete with bibliography export, citation statistics and buttons you can click to share an article with your social networking sites. Someone has invested some serious money and the site is poised to become a marketplace for research papers in China. It is common practice to have such databases for a university library website, but having a site like this for the public is rather unusual.

The “pay-to-read” site helps to illustrate how far China has progressed in protecting intellectual property (IP) in the past few decades. Since one has to pay to view obscure academic papers, popular works that have higher risks of being pirated are getting even better protection.

The journey of IP protection 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 struggled to convince its skeptical observers that effort was under way to protect international intellectual property.

During the same period, China has been strengthening IP protection domestically by developing new laws or amending old ones. It is increasingly a common understanding that we as a nation are doing ourselves a disservice by tolerating copyright infringements, as creativity and innovation become at risk if the works of scientists, artists and engineers are not protected. By keeping intellectual property within walls of protection, the creative professions gain greater freedom with which more and better things can be accomplished. As such understanding grows, a scandal of a university professor violating someone else’s copyright can spill out of the ivory tower of academia to become national news.

As a translator and writer, I personally witnessed this change during the past two decades. In the late 1980s to early1990s, translations of books like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez were easily available on college campuses in China. The translation had tremendous popularity in China as writers searched for experimental styles of creative expression. The author or his publisher never gained a cent from such translations. These were the wild west years when publishers did not play by the rules that they thought they didn’t sign up to obey. Last year, Thinkingdom Media Group was said to have paid a million dollars for the right to translate and sell this book in China.

Faced with pressure from the market, publishers now go to another extreme of paying too much for rights to translate foreign works. Good titles can bring an author and the original publisher tens of thousands. It was also reported that 1Q84 by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami fetched a million dollars from a publisher in China. There might be some marketing gimmicks for deals like this, but still, a million dollars? Publishers are competing hard to win the “next big title” to introduce to China. Some even go to the length of purchasing a writer’s entire collection of works and put them in the pipeline of translation.

This ought to be a golden age for international authors and publishers who would like to enter the Chinese market. However, through my work I found that international authors, publishers and agents sometimes are overtly cautious of publishing in China, because they have an impression of China’s IP protection that is decades out of date. They risk missing out on the opportunities that the publishing industry in China has to offer at this time. I think in a few years, the prices will regress to more moderate levels with million-dollar deals go down as legends instead of traditions.

Publishers in China are also aggressively scouting in the international market for more potential writers or writing. Some go so far as to commission the writing of books targeted specifically at a Chinese audience. Two years ago I worked with a publisher in Shanghai to persuade Dr. Edwina Pendarvis and another author to write a series of biographies of Noble Prize-winning authors, which I translated into Chinese. The publisher went on to produce audio books, targeting college-level students who want to use the series to learn about these authors’ lives and improve their English along the way.

In other fields, I also see large improvements in IP protection. My writing for newspaper columns or blogs used to be re-published at many sites without my permission. In recent two years, however, I see that more people ask for permission to use my content. This change is happening thanks to tightened laws and regulations on the one hand, and publishers’ heightened self-regulation on the other. Last year, for instance, Caixin News found that a number of sites took an article I wrote for their site without my permission. Their editor Ms. Tan Juan took the trouble to contact the administrator of each and every one of these sites to ask them to remove the article. I was really impressed with their dedication and respect for the author.

The institution of copyright has much to do with protecting the creative professions’ ability to make a profit. I am happy to find that China is making good progress to protect these professionals’ interests. Countries, like people, go through developmental stages. There was a time when Charles Dickens complained of not making a penny for his works in the United States. Now the United States has a library of laws to make sure people like Dickens get what they deserve. China may still have some way to go in its development, but it is definitely profitable to establish a presence in China now.