For at least a decade the United States has been beating on China to change its duplicitous stance on intellectual property rights. We’ve had only modest success. Now some Chinese content producers are suing other Chinese companies for copyright infringement. Now maybe we’ll see some action.

‘Content’ in various forms is the United States’ most valuable export – not cars and pork bellies, but content -- movies and CDs, software and innovative designs. America needs to protect those products from piracy. While spokesmen for these industries regularly exaggerate their IPR problems, industry and the government are right to pressure the PRC to protect intellectual property. Promoting and protecting content has to be at the center of American trade policies.

But successes have been hard to come by. Huge proportions of U.S. content sold in Chinese markets are pirated. The PRC government has found it hard to get excited about prosecuting local pirates against foreign content providers, even though American entertainers like Quincy Jones, as well as American officials like Treasury Secretary John Snow pursue good cop – bad cop efforts to get them to do the right thing.

Well, the Chinese Communist Party may now be ready to do the right thing. But not mainly because foreigners have been browbeating them lo’ these many years. More importantly, conditions on the ground in China may have changed enough recently to create a local commercial coalition that wants what we want. Not just in response to our pressure, mind you, but because their own domestic interests dictate that they do something to protect their own assets.

Howard French reports in Saturday’s New York Times that the Beijing News is suing a popular Internet site, Tom.com, for 400,000 bucks for violating its IPR and ripping off more that 25,000 articles and photos since 2003.

Whoever actually wins the case, this is a telling development. It suggests that the class of Chinese with material interests in reaping the benefits from content that they produce locally is growing fast and growing more powerful. Arguments in favor of IPR protection sound more convincing when delivered in Cantonese or Mandarin than in New Yorkese or the language of Hollywood. This shift, as both cause and effect, occurs just as President Hu and other senior officials are delivering the new high principal of today’s Chinese Communist Party -- China must become more “innovative.”

There is a broader lesson. Success in diplomacy, international trade or security hinges on knowing when these kinds of tectonic shifts are possible inside other countries, and then pressing for change. But knowing when these pivotal moments arrive requires listening attentively, not just talking loudly. This holds for democracy as it does for IPR. Should we throw down the gauntlet of democracy-building in Somalia, where the terrain is barren and inauspicious? No, not as our top priority. Should we press for greater democracy and greater commitments to open markets and IPR in China? Absolutely. And we should remember that local Chinese firms like Sohu.com and Alibaba are much more likely to change laws and business practices for the better than even the most well-meaning, and vocal, foreign firms.