China preparing a new national intellectual property strategy

China is preparing a new national-level intellectual property strategy, the first draft of which is expected to come out by the end of this year.

The country’s first and current intellectual property strategy, called the “Outline of the National Intellectual Property Strategy”, marking its 10th anniversary last year. According to China’s National Intellectual Property Administration (NIPA), by the end of last year there were over 1.6 million invention patents on the Chinese mainland, a year-on-year increase of 18.1 percent. And China’s ratio of invention patents per 10,000 people had reached 11.5.

In the 2018 Global Innovation Index (GII) ranking published by Cornell University and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), China was ranked the world’s 17th most-innovative country, the only upper-middle income economy to have broken into the top 20 list.

The rapid rise in domestic innovation reflected “a strategic direction set from the top leadership to developing world-class capacity in innovation and to moving the structural basis of the economy to more knowledge-intensive industries that rely on innovation to maintain competitive advantage,” said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry.

Shen Changyu, the head of the NIPA, said last week that China is vowing to step up the protection of intellectual property rights so they will be a cornerstone of economic development, innovation, and international trade. He said China will improve laws and regulations in order to better enhance intellectual property rights protections, and is willing to promote international cooperation in the field including jointly cracking down on counterfeiting.