Yvonne Yu, who works for an investigative service based in the United States, said Guangdong's anti-piracy campaign was working. 'I've been in the business for seven or eight years. In the past, I could easily find fake products on the streets. Now it takes a lot of effort,' she said.

Enforcement agencies carry out frequent raids on counterfeiting operations, and have started to make raids on their own initiative rather than wait for someone to lodge a complaint.

'Now they keep calling us to ask if we have any tip-offs,' Ms Yu said, adding that the raids were targeted mainly at factories to cut off the supply of fake products.

French lawyer Franck de Sevedavy said Guangzhou and Guangdong province were at the forefront of the mainland's fight against infringement of intellectual property rights and had officials specially trained to crack counterfeit cases. But he said they could do better.

He hoped to see an increase in the number of people fighting counterfeiters, especially in the police, and more cases transferred from administrative to judicial departments.

A Guangzhou Intellectual Property Office report showed the intermediate court accepted 343 new intellectual property rights cases last year while customs officers investigated and prosecuted 94 cases with a value of 4.5 million yuan, a fourfold increase on the numbers in 2002. Public security bodies handled 41 cases with a total value of 54.18 million yuan and arrested 46 suspects.

Piracy of audiovisual products continues to be serious but the authorities launched more than 6,000 checks on shops last year and found 1,737 of them had violated copyrights. The report did not provide comparative figures for 2002.