Short March: Consulate Guangzhou Drives Deep into

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 GUANGZHOU 010337

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TAGS: ECON KIPR EINV PHUM KPAO PINR AMGT CMGT CH
SUBJECT: Short March: Consulate Guangzhou Drives Deep into
Eastern Guangdong's "Chao-Shan" Heartland

REF: A) Guangzhou 5995 and previous, B) Guangzhou 3992
(both notal)

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1. (SBU) Summary: Continuing its efforts to get
especially its Entry Level Officers (ELOs) on full two-year
consular tours out of the office and onto the roads,
cities, and villages of south China to do policy advocacy
and public diplomacy work, Consulate Guangzhou embarked on
its "short march" to eastern Guangdong, particularly the
so-called Chao-Shan area centering on ancient, faded but
gradually reviving Chaozhou and upstart, pushy, and bumpily
and swervingly developing Shantou. Shantou especially is
the "heart of the heart of darkness" of intellectual
property rights (IPR) malfeasance, and some of the trip's
emphasis was on reviewing the role of local Market Order
Rectification Offices (MOROs) in IPR enforcement and on
using university presentations to tie together the themes
of respect for IPR and the innovative society that students
profess to want to build in south China. End Summary.

"Journey to the West" Concept Heads East
--------------

2. (SBU) In line with the same operational and management
philosophy behind Consulate Guangzhou's January 2006
"Journey to the West" to Guangxi (reftels),we embarked in
the second week of March on the "short march" to eastern
Guangdong by Consulate van. On the "march," the Consulate
party rotated in and out three ELOs, two of whom are on
full two-year consular tours. As with the "Journey to the
West," the ELO leadership development aim is to provide
opportunities for the consular ELOs to get literally
ground's eye and face-to-face views of places and people of
the consular district to improve the officers' visa
adjudication capabilities, provide them policy advocacy and
public speaking opportunities, and to allow for direct
mentoring from the Consul General and the
Economic/Political Section chief on interviewing and
interaction techniques, policy advocacy, and public
speaking presence.

Destinations, Way Stops, and "No Way" Stops
--------------

3. (SBU) The area we traveled to is known as the "Chao-
Shan" area, with its populace predominantly speaking a
branch of the Minnan dialect most commonly known as
Chaozhou or Teochow. Renowned for being tough and
resilient at home, the area is also the origin point of
many Overseas Chinese, particularly in Thailand and
Indonesia but with not an inconsiderable number in North
America as well. The specific destinations were: Shanwei
-- the site of Guangdong province's attempts to create
energy farms using various technologies and the scene of a
recent fatal suppression by authorities of civil unrest
(ref B) and where it was "inconvenient" for any official to
meet anybody from the Consulate; Shantou -- the least
successful of the four original Special Economic Zones set
up by Deng Xiaoping and which actually experienced negative
growth several years ago; Jieyang -- thousands of people
flee every year from overcrowding and over used land;
Chaozhou -- the traditional rival of Guangzhou within
Guangdong Province until recent times when its wonderful
culture was ravished by war and the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution and its influence eclipsed by the
despised "low class" Shantou; and Huizhou -- we stopped for
a quick visit to television and phone manufacturer TCL to
give our driver a break in an otherwise very arduously long
leg back to Guangzhou.

IPR Heart of Darkness -- and Areas of Light, Too
-------------- --------------

4. (SBU) In line with suggestions from U.S. business
sector partners to improve IPR protection and enforcement
in south China, we sought out meetings with local Market
Order Rectification Offices (MOROs),interagency offices
designed to deal with problems such as IPR that cross

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boundaries in China's densely stove-piped bureaucracy. Our
experiences in Shantou suggest that while helpful,
cooperation with MOROs is just one more avenue to pursue in
the otherwise fractured IPR protection and enforcement
environment of the "heart of darkness" of IPR violations.
Also with a view to IPR, our college student outreaches at
Shantou University and Huizhou University focused on the
relationship between innovation, highly valued by the very
patriotic Chinese student body as a means for China's march
to modernity, and IPR protection, a connection which our
student audience understood intellectually but which did
not stop them from watching pirated movies.


5. (SBU) Septel recounts our "cold-shouldered" experience
in Shanwei while the first substative report in our "short
march" series is on Shantou -- which has seen its share of
economic development rough patches but which is seemingly
climbing out of them and embarking on some comparatively
impressive economic growth.

Dong