The cover to Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk up to Dragon, one of many Harry Potter fakes published in China.
Even the most avid American Harry Potter fans might be surprised to find that Chinese youth may have surpassed them in the number of Harry Potter sequels they have read. Who in the US, for example, has read Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl, or Harry Potter and the Big Funnel? Before Potter aficionados rush out to find these rare sequels, they should know that they illustrate a major problem in Chinese Pottermania: unauthorized sequels, or fakes.
The two titles mentioned above are not unique. They belong to a longer list of Chinese Potter fakes comprised, at least, of the following:
- Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon
- Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince
- Harry Potter and Platform Nine and Three Quarters
- Harry Potter and the Showdown
- Harry Potter and
the Golden Turtle
This infringement of international copyright law is not limited to the Harry Potter name. Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon (2002) was published in China during the euphoria immediately preceding the release of Rowling's fifth book in the series. From the second paragraph of chapter 2 until the final lines of chapter 20, Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon is virtually an exact plagiarism of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.[1] Nearly all of the chapters retain Tolkien's original titles, and though most of the names are replaced by characters from Harry Potter, Gandalf remains the master wizard. Even the book's cover is an early draft of a poster by Warner Bros. to advertise the first film. And printed on the back of this forgery are the names of the publisher and translators of the authentic Potter books along with a picture of J.K. Rowling. [2]
After intense international pressure, the Chinese publisher of this book was fined about $3000 US dollars and forced to publish an apology.[3] Yet the troubles continue. The publishing of each authentic Harry Potter sequel in English is followed by a host of unauthorized Chinese translations in print and online. (The authorized Chinese translation follows the English debut by a couple of months). In some cases the pirate translators, unhappy with Rowling's ending, simply write their own.[4]
A 2001 study estimated that as many as 40 percent of all books being sold in China may be fakes.[5] The problem seems even more confounded when we learn that the worst violators of copyright are often government owned publishing houses, some with more than one hundred fake titles in print each.[6]
These are all violations of what is called Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Infractions of IPR are certainly not unique to China. However, their wide currency in China reveals the enormous stress rapid globalization has placed on China's political and legal infrastructure.
