دولت توسعه بین المللی: نظام مالکیت معنوی ژاپن در جنگ ویتنام

This article explores the international implications of the developmental state model of Japanese capitalism. It does so by investigating the extension of Japanese intellectual property (IP) policy and practice in Vietnam. The escalating role of intellectual property within Japanese industrial policy is first framed according to Johnson’s developmental state thesis and extended in reference to the ‘flying geese’ model of regional development in East Asia. This latter approach anticipates Vietnam’s growing importance as a site for Japanese foreign direct investment and technology transfer. Interviews with key informants from both countries and analysis of policy documents provide evidence of the extra-territorial practices employed by Japanese companies, government agencies, and IP intermediaries in Vietnam. These accounts bring to light key developmental mechanisms, such as the packaging of IP internationalization within Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) and the overseas pro-bono work performed by IP intermediary associations in which the line between benevolence and self-interest is blurred. The paper concludes by interpreting these practices in accordance with the broader strategic imperatives of Japan in the region.

Following the seminal work of Chalmers Johnson, 1982, Johnson, 1995 and Johnson, 1999, scholars have interpreted Japan’s modern political economy, and subsequently the late-developer trajectories of other East Asian nations, in reference to his idea of the developmental state (Woo-Cumings, 1999 and Coe et al., 2007). The developmental state model directs its focus on the relations between the state and the market. For Johnson, this relationship hinges on an elite bureaucracy which deploys state power to shape the incentive environment for private sector decision-making. To this point, however, the model’s application has been limited principally to explain these nations’ domestic institutional features, for instance in regard to industrial policy, labor relations, and so on. In contrast scholars have rarely applied the model to frame the international dimensions of developmental states ( Olds and Yeung, 2004). Yet at least in the case of Japan, recent theoretical mappings of that country’s evolving foreign direct investment patterns in East Asia suggest a way to extend thinking on the developmental state beyond what Agnew (1994) calls ‘the territorial trap’ of the domestic context. The ‘flying geese’ model in particular captures the catalytic role of Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in stimulating economic development through technology transfer in a succession of East Asian countries (Edgington and Hayter, 2000, Hayter and Edgington, 2004 and Ozawa, 2007). Provocatively, the model suggests that rounds of investment through, in sequence: the NICs (S. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), ASEAN (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines), China, and most recently Vietnam, reflect both reallocations of capital in pursuit of lower labor costs (as predicted by Frobel et al. (1980)), but also evidence of learning and bargaining by host nations. Indeed, it has proven remarkably prescient in anticipating the timing and nature of Japanese investment into China from the late 1990s, as well as the more recent shifts of Japanese investment to Vietnam (Shimizu, 2007 and JETRO, 2008). Despite these theoretical and empirical advances, several key gaps remain. Principally, scholarship has insufficiently fleshed out how the motivations and behavior of Japanese firms in the flying geese regional sphere are shaped by government policy at home. How, for example, are the investment patterns of Japanese MNCs associated with Japan’s official development assistance (ODA), its foreign aid, in the region? What role do ministries besides JICA, Japan’s development agency, play in this policy sphere? We similarly do not know very much about how the intermediaries that function in the spaces between the state and industry grease the wheels of this coordination. Yet these are precisely the sorts of relations between the state and the market that are at the heart of the developmental state thesis, albeit in its domestic version. The principal purpose of this article is to establish common ground between these two research problems, namely: (i) how developmental states internationalize, and (ii) how Japanese investment in the flying geese archipelago articulates the relationship between firms and the Japanese government. This theoretical synthesis is achieved through an empirical examination of the challenges Japanese MNCs and policy-makers face in seeking protection of their intellectual property rights in Vietnam, a transitional country where the institution of property rights is rapidly evolving. Intellectual property (IP) policy, the regulation and protection of patents, trademarks and copyrights, has emerged as an especially important component of Japanese industrial policy since the late 1990s (Takenaka, 1998). In 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi declared Japan as a ‘chizai rikkoku’ (Kantei, 2002), a nation based on intellectual property. While this initiative has produced sweeping changes in Japanese industry (Nikkei Weekly, 2005 and Nikkei Weekly, 2006), policy (JPO, 2006 and METI, 2007) and professional practice (Reiffenstein, 2009), its international dimensions have not been researched. To fill this knowledge gap we analyze the extra-territorial practices employed by Japanese IP producers, state regulators and intermediaries in Vietnam. Through analysis of secondary sources and policy documents, as well as evidence derived from the authors’ interviews with key informants in Japan and Vietnam, we draw attention to the ways that Japanese concerns over intellectual property animate its developmental role in Vietnam. These in turn are framed in accordance with the broader strategic imperatives of Japan in the region. Our analysis offers new theoretical suggestions and empirical perspective for the literature that examines intellectual property diplomacy in the developing world (Shiva, 2000, Drahos, 1996, Drahos, 2008, May and Sell, 2006, Wright, 2005, Wright, 2008, Parry, 2002 and Wade, 2003). While Japan is frequently mentioned in this literature as one of the three trilateral powers (The United States, European Union and Japan) that exert an outsized influence on the international IP landscape, it has received far less attention in comparison to its Western counterparts. Yet compelling evidence points to a set of unique motivations and practices guiding Japan’s relations with the developing world and particularly within East Asia that reflect its variety of capitalism (e.g. Taylor, 1999 and Matthews and Munoz-Tellez, 2006). The case of its intellectual property relations may also fit these patterns. It is with this need for more finer-grained analysis that this paper seeks to further understanding of Japan’s double developmental role, as an international developmental state and as a vehicle for development in Vietnam.

This article’s main contribution has been to demonstrate a spatially dynamic interpretation of the developmental state concept. Animated in accordance with the flying geese model, and filtered through the context of Japan’s ODA, it is possible to view the internationalization of Japan’s developmental state as an extension of bureaucratic planning and coordination with the private sector. The key to connecting and extending these various literatures is property rights. Despite their different functional roles and the lack of any overt coordination, there is a pronounced coherence in the activities of the three principal components of the Japanese IP system in Vietnam. Japanese IP owners have become increasingly concerned with the protection of IPR, for instance in key export sectors such as motorcycles, and in less rigid domains of IP such as trademarks. Honda, for example, has ramped up its efforts, both directly and indirectly to raise awareness of IP in Vietnam. The Japanese state, meanwhile, through the auspices of ODA, and in line with Japan’s overall developmental mandates and modes of bureaucratic organization, has channeled its efforts into improving the infrastructure of Vietnam’s IP system. Finally, Japanese IP intermediaries both through their pro-bono service work and on behalf of their clients are actively engaged in advocating for a model of IP intermediation in Vietnam that is conducive to Japan’s broader interests in that nation. Though some of our respondents were adamant about their independence from Japanese government direction, their actions nonetheless smooth the coordination between state and market. For this reason it is worthwhile reaffirming Arase’s (1994) observation that intermediaries constitute an overlooked component of Japan’s overseas development apparatus. What this suggests is that at a certain point of maturity the policy thrust of developmental states like Japan shifts to the international arena and in support of exports and FDI. Yet due to the challenge of extraterritoriality, it is in these overseas contexts that policy may have the greatest problem gaining traction. This is why bilateral policies targeted at property rights and specifically IP are such an important vehicle for securing Japanese investment in the flying geese archipelago. They simultaneously preserve Japanese accumulated industrial advantage while promising to host nations an opportunity to learn and adopt key institutional features of capitalism. Moreover, by focusing on the bilateral details of international IP diplomacy, this article advances a literature that has tended to emphasize more monolithic if multilateral forms of developmental coercion such as TRIPS. Though this article’s vantage point is necessarily partial, it is still worthwhile offering comment on whether Japanese involvement is good for Vietnam’s development. While the answer is beyond the scope of this study alone, our evidence can contribute a few things to the body of work on North–South IP developmental diplomacy. First of all, if good governance is taken as a measure of development, then gradual improvement in Vietnam’s IP infrastructure and the training of experts represent key institutional gains. MOIPA, if it can effectively be harnessed, goes a long way to improving the transparency of the IP system. Yet as we saw in the case of MOIPA, technical progress hinges on cultural change within the regulatory structures of a transitional state. In order for Vietnamese IP regulators to most effectively ensure their national interests, they must have the sufficient skills to effectively mediate between domestic and international pressures for IP development. Vietnam, along with other ASEAN countries is often framed by IP owners as an unlawful space, in terms of its embryonic regulatory environment for IP. To a large degree its intermediaries and their Japanese counterparts are the brokers of this IP developmental boom, since their professional socialization has occurred outside a socialist context. Indeed, the ranks of Vietnamese IP professionals have swelled as IP has become more legitimized. However beyond the technocrats within the state apparatus and the intermediaries, the prospects for Vietnamese inventors are a bit bleaker. Despite modest improvement in the rate of domestic invention, the system appears to be almost entirely colonized by foreign applicants. In a purely bilateral view, given all the efforts of cooperation, it is a stretch to say, however, that Japan alone has fulfilled List’s maxim of ‘kicking the [developmental] ladder away.’ Japan and the trilateral nations have proposed their respective models and Vietnam, in line with Dixon’s (2000) optimistic appraisal, has chosen and crafted a unique environment that draws on these diverse sources. However, it is likely too late for Vietnam to engineer a national IP policy with the sort of favorable conditions that Japan and other rich nations once enjoyed. Perhaps, then, all the bilateral developmental policy and rhetoric that we saw in this study is necessary to convince policy makers in developing host nations like Vietnam that any flaws inherent to multilateral agreements such as TRIPS are not the responsibility of the individual nations such as Japan that contributed so much to their design and imposition.