Impact Of IPR Protection On China’s Imports Structure

China, as a developing country, has developed at the surprisingly high rate, in terms of GDP and other economic figures. However, such high pace of development has been blamed at the expense of China’s resources and environment, plus the scientific and technological contribution value is very low. Trade as one of the three pillars of China’s economy, which has always being relying on its cheap labor, rich resources and environment, rather than science and technology, which should play the main role in the development of economy. Therefore, by having such special paths of development, huge potential risks have been buried in its future sustainable development. As a result, to introduce foreign countries’advanced technologies and fine products could be a smart way to improve ourselves, especially our technology and science is not ready yet. However, there is difficult for China to do so, because the barrier of exporting Intellectual property to China has been getting higher and higher due to the strong trade protectionism ideology. Therefore, such import activities will be inevitably and negatively affected. Based on this background, the article explores the relationship between the level of intellectual property protection and imports structure as well as the relationship between the level of intellectual property protection and the imports of high-tech products.According to an overview of the relevant literature, the level of IPR protection will influence the exporters’behavior and importing country enterprises’willings to imitating exporters’products and technologies, through which effectively affect the importing country’s trade structure. In addition, the level of China Intellectual property rights (IPR) protection has been quantized according to the research made by Yuxiong Han and Huaizu Li, based on the reality of China Intellectual property rights protections. In further, they also suggest it could be relatively accurate to reflect the level of China intellectual property rights protection through the amount of patents applications being accepted and the amount of being approved. In the empirical test, there is a founding which could be made by studying the relationship between the quantized IPR protection and three major categories (primary, industrial manufactured and hi-tech products) of importing products, firstly, IPR protection only has very litter impact on primary product import; for industrial manufactured products, there is certain impact; however, for hi-tech products, the impact is the most strongest. Therefore, the conclusion here is that the level of IPR protection could significantly influence importing trade structure. Furthermore, by studying the relationship between the amount of approved patents and the amount of hi-tech imports, the conclusion that previous patent approvals could make positive impact on current importing amounts, especially the strong impact comes from the invention type patents and creative type patents. As a result, this paper believes by improving the level of IPR protections could considerably and positively increase hi-tech imports, then optimize the import structure.