China Trademark Law 2026 Revision: Key Changes Every Brand Owner Must Know

Introduction

China has completed the most consequential rewrite of its Trademark Law in over a decade. On June 26, 2026, the 23rd Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Fourteenth National People's Congress adopted a comprehensive revision of the Trademark Law of the People's Republic of China — the fifth amendment since the law was first enacted in 1982, and the first substantive overhaul since the narrow 2019 revision. The revised law, comprising 87 articles across nine chapters (up from 73 articles in eight chapters under the outgoing law), will enter into force on January 1, 2027. Trademarks registered before that date remain valid.

For brand owners, in-house counsel, and IP practitioners with China exposure, this is not a routine update. The revision touches registration standards, opposition timelines, well-known mark protection, damages calculations, and — perhaps most significantly — the treatment of bad-faith and speculative filings that have long troubled foreign entrants to the Chinese market. This article walks through where the amendment came from, what it actually changes, and what businesses should be doing before the January 1, 2027 effective date.

How We Got Here: A Legislative Timeline

The outgoing Trademark Law was last substantively amended in 2019, in a narrow "stopgap" revision aimed primarily at curbing trademark hoarding. Work on a more comprehensive rewrite began soon after, culminating in a first full draft circulated by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) for public comment on January 13, 2023. That 2023 CNIPA draft was ambitious: 101 articles across 10 chapters, including sweeping ideas such as a formal "use in commerce" requirement for maintaining registrations and new restrictions on duplicate filings.

Much of that ambition did not survive the journey to the National People's Congress (NPC). The version submitted for first reading in December 2025 was considerably leaner — 84 articles across nine chapters — and the text ultimately adopted in June 2026 settled at 87 articles in nine chapters. Several of the more contentious 2023 proposals, including the strict use-in-commerce maintenance requirement and the duplicate-registration prohibition, were dropped or softened. The result reflects a pragmatic, incremental legislative posture: codify what has already proven workable in administrative and judicial practice, rather than introduce untested new machinery.

Key milestones:

•      January 13, 2023 — CNIPA circulates its first comprehensive draft amendment for public comment (101 articles, 10 chapters).

•      November 14, 2025 — The State Council discusses and approves the revised draft in principle, referring it to the NPC Standing Committee.

•      December 22, 2025 — The draft is formally submitted to the NPC Standing Committee for first reading.

•      December 25–27, 2025 — Group deliberations take place; the draft (84 articles, nine chapters) is released for public consultation.

•      February 9–10, 2026 — The 45-day public comment period closes.

•      June 26, 2026 — The revised Trademark Law is adopted at the 23rd Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Fourteenth NPC (87 articles, nine chapters).

•      January 1, 2027 — The revised law enters into force. Trademarks registered before this date remain valid.

Notably, the amendment was adopted even though China's 2026 Legislative Work Plan did not explicitly list it — confirming what most observers had predicted: the substantive direction of the draft was settled, and the legislature moved faster than the formal plan suggested.

The Core Policy Shift: From Registration to Genuine Use

If there is a single thread running through this amendment, it is a shift in emphasis from mere registration toward actual, legitimate use in commerce. China's first-to-file system is not being abandoned — that fundamental architecture remains intact — but the revised law closes off many of the loopholes that have allowed speculative and bad-faith filers to exploit that system at the expense of genuine brand owners, including foreign companies that had not yet registered in China. According to the NPC Standing Committee's Legislative Affairs Commission, the revision responds directly to the "repeated occurrence of malicious trademark applications," insufficient penalties for infringement, excessive rights enforcement by registrants, and disorder in the trademark agency industry.

Key Substantive Changes

1. An Explicit Anti-Bad-Faith Filing Regime — With Direct Penalties on Applicants

The outgoing law contained a general, largely discretionary prohibition on bad-faith filings made without genuine intent to use. The revised law hardens this into a structured statutory framework: applications that are not intended for use and clearly exceed the needs of normal business operations will be refused, alongside the existing bar on filings made in a deceptive manner or through other improper means.

Crucially, the revised law goes further than refusal. Article 54 creates, for the first time, a standalone administrative penalty aimed at applicants themselves: where an applicant commits enumerated acts of bad-faith registration that cause adverse effects — including knowingly filing deceptive or misleading marks, filing without intent to use beyond normal business needs, or intentionally filing in violation of the well-known mark, agent/representative, or prior-rights provisions — the trademark enforcement authority may issue a warning and impose a fine of up to RMB 100,000. Under the outgoing framework, comparable fines under the implementing regulations were capped at roughly RMB 10,000, and penalties fell mainly on agencies rather than applicants. This converts what was previously a case-by-case administrative judgment call into a clear "registration refusal plus fine" enforcement loop, and commercial use of the mark is not a prerequisite for punishment — the filing itself suffices.

2. Steeper Penalties for Trademark Agencies and Their Personnel

The revised law raises the stakes considerably for the professionals who enable bad-faith actors. Trademark agencies that knowingly assist bad-faith filings, accept conflicting engagements, forge legal documents, or commit other enumerated misconduct face fines of up to RMB 200,000 in serious cases, with suspension of their agency business also available; individually responsible practitioners face fines of up to RMB 100,000. New Article 69 extends this reach extraterritorially in one respect: where an agent handles overseas trademark matters for a Chinese client using fraud or other improper means and causes harm, the agency misconduct penalties apply — a notable development for firms handling international filing work. Some practitioners also observe that especially egregious conduct could, in principle, expose agents to criminal liability for fraud or forgery under the PRC Criminal Law, though this would run through existing criminal provisions rather than the Trademark Law itself.

3. A Shorter Opposition Window: Three Months Becomes Two

Article 36 of the revised law shortens the opposition period following publication of a preliminarily approved mark from three months to two months. This is one of the most operationally significant changes for brand owners, because it compresses the time available to monitor gazette publications, investigate suspicious filings, obtain internal sign-off, and prepare and file a formal opposition. Businesses that currently rely on periodic or reactive portfolio reviews — rather than continuous watch services — are at real risk of missing the window entirely once the law takes effect. Consistent with the shortened period, trademark rights following an unopposed publication are now calculated from the date two months (rather than three) after the preliminary approval announcement.

4. Dynamic Marks Now Registrable — Subject to a Functionality Exclusion

Article 14 expands the categories of registrable signs to include dynamic marks (motion marks) alongside words, devices, letters, numerals, three-dimensional signs, colour combinations, and sounds. This keeps the law in step with contemporary branding formats such as animated logos, motion graphics, and dynamic UI elements. Applicants should note the accompanying constraint: Article 18 extends the functionality exclusion — previously applicable only to three-dimensional marks — to colour combinations, sounds, and dynamic marks. Dynamic effects that arise from the nature of the goods, are necessary to achieve a technical result, or give substantial value to the goods are not registrable, and Article 73 correspondingly provides that a registrant cannot prohibit others' legitimate use of functional features. Non-traditional registrations will therefore be open to functionality challenges that previously applied only to shape marks.

5. Online Use Expressly Counts as Trademark Use

A quiet but practically important addition: Article 2 now expressly provides that trademark use includes use carried out through the internet and other information networks. This clarifies that use on e-commerce platforms, social media, and other digital channels counts toward defeating non-use cancellation actions — and, equally, that online infringing activity falls squarely within the scope of acts that can trigger administrative enforcement. For brands whose Chinese market presence is primarily digital, evidencing and archiving online use just became considerably more valuable.

6. Good Faith Expanded into an Anti-Abuse Principle

Article 9 retains the principle of good faith in the registration and use of trademarks and adds an express prohibition on abusing trademark rights to harm national interests, public interests, or the lawful rights and interests of others. This gives CNIPA and the courts a broader textual basis to address opportunistic conduct across the full lifecycle of a mark — from application through enforcement — even where the conduct does not fall neatly within an enumerated bad-faith category.

7. Broader Cross-Class Protection for Well-Known Marks

Under the outgoing law (Article 13(3)), cross-class protection against imitation on dissimilar goods or services was available only to well-known trademarks already registered in China. The revised law meaningfully expands this: protection against copying, imitation, or translation of a well-known mark on dissimilar goods extends to marks that are widely recognised in China even where they have not yet been registered there. This is a welcome and long-requested change for foreign brand owners with strong reputations who delayed registering in China and have historically been vulnerable to squatting on dissimilar goods. Two caveats remain: recognition of well-known status is still case-specific, decided on an as-needed basis, and subject to a high evidentiary bar in practice — this is an expanded door, not an automatic entitlement. Separately, new Article 69 allows CNIPA, upon request, to formally confirm a mark's well-known status in China for use in overseas examination or proceedings, applying the recognition factors in Article 63.

8. From "Prior Rights" to "Prior Legitimate Interests"

The revised law broadens the concept of "prior rights" that can block a conflicting application to the more elastic "prior legitimate interests." The outgoing law protected a defined set of prior rights — trade names, distinctive brand identifiers, packaging and trade dress of goods with an established reputation, and similar interests. The new formulation is deliberately more flexible, creating room to cover emerging forms of commercial identity that do not map neatly onto the old categories — social media account names and handles, for example, or the names and likenesses of virtual and AI-generated characters. For brand owners whose commercial identity increasingly lives online, this is a meaningful (if still judicially untested) expansion of the toolkit available to challenge conflicting filings.

9. Ex Officio Cancellation, Misleading Use, and a One-Year Re-Filing Bar

The revised law strengthens post-registration discipline in three connected ways. First, Article 56 empowers the authorities to act against registrations on their own initiative: marks that have become generic, or that have gone unused for three consecutive years, may be cancelled ex officio rather than only upon a third party's petition. Second, the same article creates a tiered penalty for misleading use of a registered mark — an order to rectify within a specified period, a fine of up to RMB 50,000 for non-compliance, and cancellation of the registration in serious cases. Third, Article 49 introduces a one-year bar following the voluntary cancellation of a registration: for one year from the announcement, applications by third parties for identical or similar marks on the same or similar goods will not be approved. The outgoing law already imposed a one-year bar after cancellation, invalidation, or non-renewal, but its application to voluntary surrenders was unclear; the new provision closes a gap that could be exploited through strategic cancellation followed by immediate re-filing, reducing the recurring cycle in which a mark is cancelled only for the dispute to restart under a new applicant.

10. A Rebalanced Damages Framework

Article 77 rebalances how infringement damages are calculated. Under the outgoing law, courts turned first to the rights holder's actual losses, and only then to the infringer's profits. The revised law places these two measures on an equal footing as co-equal primary methods, aligning the Trademark Law's damages methodology with recent revisions to China's Copyright Law, Patent Law, and Anti-Unfair Competition Law. Where actual losses, infringer's profits, and licence-fee multiples are all difficult to determine, the statutory damages ceiling remains RMB 5,000,000, and punitive damages of one to five times the base amount remain available for intentional (willful) infringement in serious circumstances — the revised text also aligns its terminology here with the Civil Code and sister IP statutes, using "intentional" (故意) in the punitive damages context. The law further confirms that reasonable enforcement costs — attorney's fees, notarisation costs, and expenses incurred gathering evidence of infringement — are recoverable in addition to, rather than absorbed within, the base damages award, and retains the court's power to order infringers to produce accounts and records, with adverse inferences available against non-production or falsification.

One point on which earlier draft commentary requires correction in light of the final text: the non-use defence survives. Article 78 provides that a defendant may resist a damages claim by showing the rights holder's failure to use the asserted mark, with the relevant three-year period now expressly anchored to the period before the infringing act occurred. Rights holders should therefore treat systematic use-evidence collection not merely as insurance against non-use cancellation, but as a precondition to monetary recovery.

11. Civil Liability for Malicious Litigation

New Article 81 addresses the use of trademark litigation as a tool of harassment or anti-competitive pressure — a recognised problem in China's enforcement landscape. Where a party brings trademark litigation through malicious collusion with another party, or by unilaterally fabricating the basic facts of a case, the court may impose sanctions under the applicable procedural rules; and where such conduct causes loss to the opposing party, the responsible party bears civil liability for damages. This gives victims of vexatious or manufactured claims a direct civil remedy rather than leaving them to rely solely on regulators. The thresholds for "malicious collusion" and "fabrication of basic facts" are not defined in the statute, and courts will need to develop standards through case law — defendants facing claims they believe to be abusive should document the circumstances carefully with this provision in mind.

What Was Left Out — and Why It Matters

It is worth noting what did not make the cut. The 2023 CNIPA draft's more ambitious "use in commerce" maintenance requirement — which would have required registrants to affirmatively demonstrate ongoing use (for instance, through periodic use statements) to keep a registration alive, similar to systems in some other jurisdictions — does not appear in the enacted law. Nor does the earlier draft's proposed prohibition on duplicate registrations. This is best read as legislative restraint: the drafters prioritised changes that codify practices already reasonably mature and operationally workable within CNIPA and the courts, rather than importing untested institutional structures wholesale. For brand owners who rely on defensive filing strategies — registering marks across classes where there is no immediate intent to use, purely to block pirates — this restraint is good news, at least for now. But note the tension with the new anti-bad-faith provisions discussed above: filings that "clearly exceed the needs of normal business operations" now carry refusal and fine risk, so defensive programmes must be scoped and documented with care.

Practical Implications for Brand Owners

The amendment is not a stricter compliance regime aimed at foreign companies — its core policy targets are bad-faith domestic squatting and agent misconduct. But the practical consequences fall on every rights holder operating, or planning to operate, in China, and the runway to January 1, 2027 is short:

•      Upgrade monitoring before the effective date. The compressed two-month opposition window means portfolio reviews conducted quarterly, or only when a dispute arises, are no longer adequate. Continuous trademark watch services, paired with a fast internal escalation and sign-off process, are now close to mandatory rather than best practice.

•      File earlier, not later. Cross-class protection for unregistered well-known marks gives established foreign brands a stronger fallback — but the evidentiary bar for well-known status remains high, and registration remains the far more reliable path to protection.

•      Build and archive use evidence — including online use. With the non-use defence to damages expressly retained (Article 78) and online use expressly recognised (Article 2), rights holders should systematically capture dated evidence of use on e-commerce platforms, social media, and other digital channels. Use records are now central both to keeping registrations alive and to recovering damages.

•      Reassess defensive filing strategy. Because the strict use-in-commerce maintenance requirement was dropped, broader defensive filing programmes remain viable for now — but filings that clearly exceed normal business needs can be refused and fined under Articles 18 and 54, so defensive filings should be scoped conservatively and documented with a genuine business rationale.

•      Reconsider agent relationships. With agencies facing fines of up to RMB 200,000 (and possible suspension) and individual practitioners up to RMB 100,000 for knowingly facilitating bad-faith filings — now including misconduct in overseas matters handled for Chinese clients — brand owners should ensure their local agents are reputable and free of conflicting engagements.

•      Document losses and enforcement costs separately. The rebalanced damages framework rewards rights holders who can substantiate actual losses or infringer profits with solid evidence, and who track reasonable enforcement expenses (legal fees, notarisation, investigation costs) separately, since these are recoverable as an add-on rather than absorbed into a lump sum.

•      Watch for opportunities under the prior-legitimate-interests language. Brands with significant online or social-media identity — handles, virtual character likenesses, and similar assets — should start assembling evidence of those interests now, since the broadened concept appears designed with exactly this kind of asset in mind.

Effective Date, Transition, and Outlook

The revised law enters into force on January 1, 2027, and Article 87 confirms that trademarks registered before implementation remain valid. Implementing regulations and CNIPA examination guidance are expected to follow ahead of the effective date, and these will determine much of the practical detail — including how the bad-faith filing penalties are administered and how the well-known mark confirmation mechanism operates. Brand owners have a defined, and fairly short, transition window: the sensible course is to complete portfolio audits, upgrade watch arrangements to a two-month response cycle, and put use-evidence systems in place well before the new law takes effect, rather than waiting for the implementing rules.

Disclaimer: This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should obtain advice on their specific circumstances before acting.