While this story may be old news for folks in China, Fortune magazine has a good roundup of the New Balance story in the PRC, and some of the perils of outsourcing overseas, the legal landscape and losing control over a brand. The nut graf:

Now that Western companies are pervasively outsourcing the manufacture of their products to factories overseas, they’re entrusting their precious intellectual property – designs, molds, specifications, trade secrets – to hundreds of contractors and subcontractors all over the world. It’s extremely hard to police global supply chains, and IP is leaking out through 1,000 cracks.

A good adjunct to this story is the tale of NEC, from the IHT.