On December 17, 2025, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) released the Report on the Development of Building a Strong Intellectual Property Nation (2025) (知识产权强国建设发展报告(2025年)). The Report concludes that “overall progress in building a strong intellectual property nation is good… the rule of law has been further strengthened and the protection of intellectual property rights has been continuously intensified.” Nonetheless, in 2024 CNIPA “completed three rounds of investigations into 597,000 irregular patent applications and cracked down on 427,000 malicious trademark registrations throughout the entire process.” That is, assuming the irregular patent applications include invention, utility model and designs, ~10.2% of all applications filed in 2024 were ‘irregular.’ This is a decrease though from the 815,000 irregular applications in 2021.
Highlights follow. The full text is available here (Chinese only).
- CNIPA completed three rounds of investigations into 597,000 irregular patent applications and cracked down on 427,000 malicious trademark registrations throughout the entire process.
Note that Article 2 of the Measures Regarding the Regulation of Patent Applications (关于规范申请专利行为的办法) defines the following behaviors as abnormal or irregular:
(1) Simultaneously or successively submitting multiple patent applications that are obviously the same in invention-creation content, or are essentially formed by simple combinations of different invention-creation features or elements;
(2) The submitted patent application contains fabricated, forged or altered inventions and creations, experimental data or technical effects, or plagiarism, simple replacement, patchwork of existing technology or existing designs, etc.;
(3) The invention-creation of the submitted patent application is obviously inconsistent with the actual research and development capabilities and resource conditions of the applicant and inventor;
(4) The invention-creation content of multiple patent applications submitted is mainly generated randomly by computer programs or other technologies;
(5) The invention-creation of the submitted patent application is an invention deliberately formed for the purpose of circumventing patentability examination, which is obviously inconsistent with technical improvement or design common sense, or has no actual protection value, is inferior, piles up, or unnecessarily limits the scope of protection Creation, or content without any search and review significance;
(6) In order to evade the supervision measures against irregular patent applications, multiple patent applications that are substantially related to a specific entity, individual or address are scattered, submitted sequentially or in different places;
(7) Not buying or reselling patent application rights or patent rights for the implementation of patented technologies, designs or other legitimate purposes, or falsely altering inventors or designers;
(8) Patent agencies, patent agents, or other institutions or individuals, acting as agents, inducing, instigating, helping others, or conspiring with them to implement various types of irregular patent applications;
(9) Other irregular patent applications and related behaviors that violate the principle of good faith and disrupt the normal order of patent work.
- The average examination period for invention patents was shortened to 15.5 months, and the average examination period for trademark registration remained stable at 4 months.
- The average processing time for software copyright registration remained stable at 30 working days.
- Local people’s courts at all levels concluded 457,300 first-instance civil cases concerning intellectual property rights and accepted 30,500 new second-instance civil cases concerning intellectual property rights.
- Punitive damages were applied to 460 cases of serious malicious infringement in 2024, an increase of 44.2% year-on-year.
- The “New Energy Vehicle Chassis” technology secret infringement
case set a new record for the amount of damages awarded in domestic intellectual property infringement cases and was selected as one of the ” Top Ten Cases Promoting the Rule of Law in the New Era in 2024.” [Note that damages were never collected making this a hollow victory.] - The Supreme People’s Procuratorate established an Intellectual Property Procuratorial Department.
- Procuratorial organs nationwide accepted and reviewed 7,600 cases
involving 13,500 individuals for arrest related to intellectual property infringement crimes, accepted and reviewed 13,800 cases involving
33,800 individuals for prosecution, and handled 4,219 civil, administrative, and public interest litigation cases related to intellectual
property. - The Ministry of Public Security established an Intellectual Property Crime Investigation Bureau. Public security organs nationwide investigated 37,000 cases of intellectual property infringement and the production and sale of counterfeit and shoddy goods.
- Market supervision departments nationwide investigated and handled 44,000 cases of violations in the trademark, patent, and other
fields, involving a total amount of 1.129 billion RMB. - The number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 people reached 14 in 2024, an increase of 2.2 compared to the previous year.
