We're not all copycats.

I refer to the article" JLR thwarted in its lawsuit against Jiangling" (News, PE July). As an engineer working on original equipment, I fully empathise with the alleged victims of copycatting.

However, as a Singaporean, I was disturbed by the conflation of "Asia" and the "Far East" with the widely asserted trend of intellectual property violations in China. While "Asia" is a convenient label for categorising countries by geographical location, lazy generalisation of these countries' other characteristics based purely on proximity is offensive and misleading.

Singapore, for example, consistently ranks highly for intellectual property protection: the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report 201 file ranked Singapore fourth in the world, and agreed with the US Global Intellectual Property Center's International IP Index 2016 in ranking the country top in Asia. Furthermore, the Global Innovation Index 2015 ranked Singapore as the seventh most innovative nation in the world.

The underlying principles of mutual respect, honesty and intellectualism are, undoubtedly, values that Singapore shares with the UK.

Perhaps the engineering community could take some inspiration from economists and the financial world: the "tiger" economies roared unmistakably in the 1980s, while the more recently coined "G20" and "Anglosphere" are now common parlance.

Joash Lee, Derby