The “Copyright in China” Thematic Exhibition was recently held at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). On July 8 local time, the WIPO Copyright Protection Best Practice Demonstration Research Project IP and Creative Industry: Jingdezhen Story (a bilingual monograph in Chinese and English) was released at the WIPO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

It is understood that the WIPO Copyright Protection Best Practice Demonstration Research Project is a cooperative agreement between the National Copyright Administration of China (NCAC) and the WIPO to promote China’s exemplary copyright protection cases globally. The specific cases to be recommended are determined through consultation between the NCAC and the WIPO.

IP and Creative Industry: Jingdezhen Story is the fourth case nationwide—and the only one—demonstrating how copyright supports the development of an entire city. The achievements have been published as a bilingual monograph in Chinese and English, with a foreword written by Hasan Kleib, Deputy Director General of the WIPO, and promoted worldwide. The project disseminates Jingdezhen’s model of leveraging copyright protection to drive urban development to a global audience, carrying great significance for harnessing copyright to advance the development of the Jingdezhen National Ceramic Culture Inheritance and Innovation Pilot Zone and for telling the story of Chinese ceramics to the world.

On the large electronic screen at the venue, the promotional video of the same name, “Jingdezhen Story”, was played in rotation. With the central theme of “telling cultural confidence of capital ‘China’ (the country) through lowercase ‘china’ (porcelain)”, it vividly presented how Jingdezhen, through the copyright stories of three generations of ceramic artists—local masters and “foreign Jingpiao” (expatriate artisans in Jingdezhen)—has leveraged copyright protection and innovative application to reignite its millennia-old kiln fires, enabling the traditional ceramic industry to flourish with new vitality in the present era, and making Jingdezhen a global model of high-quality creative industry development driven by copyright.

The “Jingdezhen Story” Thematic Exhibition featured more than ten works of various types and ran from July 8 to 17. Representatives of the WIPO member states, as well as observers, visited and viewed the exhibition.