Ewen Turner is an expert in counterfeit investigations, risk management and intellectual property protection. He has worked in the IP and business risks consulting industry, and as the Investigations Manager for General Motors. His residence is in China, where he has worked and lived for over 20 years.

Chinese counterfeiting raids and blurred ethical boundaries, this is Ewen Turner’s world.

Ewen works in brand protection, falling under the wider umbrella of intellectual property (IP) protection. This means fighting trademark infringements, along with other IP theft often in the form of counterfeit production.

It’s a job that provides insight into how murky the line between law and ethics can become.

“In my field, we're not there to say good things about counterfeiters and there are very, very nasty cases with fake medicine and other really life-threatening products.

“But while you can talk about all counterfeiters a being this evil little guy, they are often businessmen facing ‘supply and demand.’

“This means that even if a factory operator hopes to do business with their own product—avoiding all risks associated with counterfeiting—trading companies placing orders may only want to source fakes. So this is what the counterfeiter does to survive in many cases.”

He has also seen first-hand the difficult conditions workers face in such environments but said wider socio-economic problems mean these factories may be the only chance they had at making a living.

“I got involved in a riot once... the officials begin to seize all the brands, not just those they're investigating on behalf of, so the boss [of the factory] starts looking around. He basically said to the workers ‘Guys, if they take everything, I’m not going to be able to pay you all,’ so next minute the workers are trying to throw the officials out so they can’t continue the raid. You do see the choices people have to make sometimes. Life’s tough.”

He believes this philosophy is more essential now as the counterfeiting landscape evolves with the rest of the technological world.

“What I've seen over the last 20 years with the growth of eCommerce, is the entire business conducted in a digital environment… when you investigate them there’s no physical shop, office, nothing. With these digital entities, you take the site offline and another one pops up. So the challenges are huge.”

Importance of cultural competency in securing opportunities

After studying for a year in both Nanjing and Shanghai, China, Ewen had developed an interest in China and an ability to speak Chinese—a rarity for Westerners at the time.

This led to teaching English in a town just outside Guangzhou, when he ran into a friend who introduced him to the world of security and risk management. Ewen said he got a lucky start thanks to his language and cultural competency skills.

“It was within the security field... so they had tried people in the past that would come into China with law enforcement backgrounds and all these professional skillsets but they couldn't deal with China. So [the employer] thought it was more important to have someone with a Chinese background, and all the practical investigation skills could be learnt on the job,” Ewen explained.

“They needed someone who not only could get by day-to-day living but also knew the Chinese language well enough to be able to talk to local investigators, government enforcement agencies, read Chinese reports, etc.