On January 24, 2022, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) released the 2022 National Intellectual Property Administrative Protection Work Plan (国家知识产权局关于印发2022年全国知识产权行政保护工作方案的通知). Two interesting goals of the Plan include further reducing abnormal patent applications and malicious trademark registrations and gradually reduce and eventually eliminate financial subsidies for patent authorization.

Item 3 of the Plan not only includes the cracking down on irregular/malicious applications but specifically mentions “strictly prevent the international impact caused by the spillover of abnormal applications” by establishing a key monitoring list. This is presumably in response to the USPTO’s termination over 15,000 U.S. trademark applications from China for fraud and a sanction of a U.S. patent attorney for renting out his law license to a Chinese trademark agency.

Also of interest is the plan to formulate and implement a promotion plan for the implementation of the Opinions on Strengthening Intellectual Property Protection from 2022 to 2023 (关于强化知识产权保护的意见). A prior version dates from 2019 and specified increasing the punishment for infringement and counterfeiting as well as amending patent, trademark and copyright laws, etc.

The full text of the Plan is available here (Chinese only).