99. The representative of the China thanked the Members that had demonstrated their interest in China's IPR issues by putting forward so many questions and comments. Although it was fair to say that China never liked the Article 18 review which imposed WTO-plus obligations on China, China never escaped from fulfilling its commitments. Contrary to what some Members had said, China was always willing to take full advantage of this review mechanism in word and in spirit and had been doing so in the past five years by providing the required information and by responding to the enormous number of questions put forward by Members. However, it should be emphasized again that Article 18 was a provision with a special nature and a limited function, and that it did not require China to provide written responses nor to respond to any questions that went beyond its commitments under the TRIPS Agreement. Some questions that China had not provided answers to were closely linked to the IPR case that was already the subject of a panel process, which would be the more appropriate mechanism to deal with those questions. China's door was always open for cooperation on IPR issues, both bilaterally and multilaterally. Such additional questions and comments could always be dealt with through other more appropriate channels. With regard to the specific cases put forward by some Members, he said that IPR was a global issue instead of a country-specific one. He had visited a shopping centre in central London where he had seen a small vendor selling Louis Vuitton bags that had obviously been pirated, but such isolated cases did, of course, not diminish the efforts by those developed Members regarding their IPR enforcement. The same applied with regard to those isolated cases existing in China.
