Comment by eemil

Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:

1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins

2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country

In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.