China's 2026 Trademark Law: act before 2027

What has actually been adopted, and when does it start to bite?

China’s fifth revision of the Trademark Law was passed in June 2026 and takes effect on 1 January 2027, which gives portfolio owners a defined and fairly short runway to adjust filing, watching and agency arrangements.

That runway matters more than the headline count of amended articles. Several of the changes are not additive protections that a brand owner can take up at leisure; they are new procedural deadlines and new grounds of attack that apply to registrations already sitting in the portfolio. A defensive registration filed in 2019 and never used is not grandfathered by inertia. It sits in the same register that, from January 2027, is subject to a different set of rules.

The practical consequence is that the work has to be done in 2026. Anything that depends on gathering evidence, re-papering instructions to local agents, or reconfiguring a watching service takes months, not weeks, and there is no version of this revision under which a Western brand owner benefits from waiting to see what happens.

Why does the shortened opposition window change your watching cadence?

Article 36 of the revised law shortens the opposition period from three months to two months from the date of publication, which compresses the entire internal chain from detection to filed opposition by a third.

Consider what has to happen inside that window. A watch notice has to reach the right person; the mark has to be assessed against the portfolio and against known squatter patterns; a business decision has to be taken on whether to oppose; local counsel has to be instructed; and evidence has to be assembled and filed. Under a three-month window, a quarterly watch report was survivable, if uncomfortable — a mark published shortly after a report still left several weeks. Under two months, a quarterly cadence can consume the entire period before anyone in-house has seen the mark.

Monthly watching should therefore be treated as the floor rather than the aspiration for China, with a named owner and a standing escalation route for marks that touch core brands. Where a house brand is a known squatting target, a shorter interval is defensible. The change is procedurally small and operationally significant, and it is the one item on this list that will silently cost rights if nobody adjusts.

Which changes cut against Western-style defensive filing?

Two do, and they work together. Article 57 of the revised law grants the State Council trademark authority power to initiate non-use cancellation proceedings on its own motion against marks unused for three consecutive years without legitimate reason; under the 2019 law, three-year non-use cancellation could only be initiated by third parties.

That is a structural shift in how defensive portfolios are exposed. A defensive filing strategy built on breadth — registrations across adjacent classes, in variant scripts, for product lines never launched in China — has until now relied on the fact that someone with standing and appetite had to come and attack each registration. The registry itself had no initiative. Removing that assumption means every unused registration is a potential candidate for cancellation without any third party lifting a finger.

The second change is on the filing side. Article 19 of the revised law prohibits applications not intended for use and clearly exceeding the needs of normal production and business operations, and the revised law provides that an applicant committing enumerated bad-faith registration conduct causing adverse effects may be fined up to RMB 100,000. A filing programme designed principally to occupy register space, rather than to protect actual or planned use, now runs against an express prohibition and a monetary sanction.

The corresponding relief is on the evidence side: the revised law expressly includes online use on e-commerce platforms and social media within the definition of trademark use for resisting non-use cancellation. For many European brands, that is where the only Chinese-facing use actually happens, and it should now be capable of being pleaded.

What new exposure sits with the agents in your chain?

The revised law provides that a trademark agency which knows or should know a client’s filing is a bad-faith application and accepts the instruction anyway bears corresponding legal liability, alongside a registration duty and materially higher fines.

Under the revised law, trademark agencies and individual practitioners must register their information with the State Council trademark authority, and serious violations by trademark agencies attract fines of up to RMB 200,000. The effect on a foreign brand owner is indirect but real: the agent who has for years filed whatever list was sent to them each quarter now has their own reason to ask what the filings are for.

That argues for re-papering instructions before January 2027 rather than discovering the friction mid-instruction. Standing instructions should say, on their face, what commercial use or planned use each filing supports, so that the agent can accept them without inquiry and so that the file itself carries the answer if the question is ever asked later.

What does the revision give brand owners in return?

A broader definition of what can be registered, wider protection for well-known marks, and a stronger damages framework.

On registrability, Article 14 of the revised law adds dynamic marks to the list of registrable signs, while Article 18 extends the functionality exclusion — previously applied only to three-dimensional marks — to all non-traditional mark types. Brands with motion logos gain a filing route; brands relying on shape, sound or other non-traditional signs face a functionality objection where none previously applied to their mark type.

On well-known marks, Article 21 of the revised law extends cross-class protection against reproduction, imitation or translation to unregistered well-known trademarks. Article 49 narrows the one-year filing bar to cases where the registrant has applied to cancel the registration.

On enforcement, Article 77 places the infringer’s gains on equal footing with the rights holder’s actual loss as a first-order method of calculating damages, and the revised law provides for statutory damages of up to RMB 5 million. Article 81 specifies malicious collusion between parties and unilateral fabrication of the basic facts of a case as malicious trademark litigation conduct — relevant to brand owners on the receiving end of manufactured claims.

Two further provisions cut both ways. Article 73 provides that use of a registered trademark solely to indicate the purpose, intended users or application scenarios of goods, or the true source of goods, does not constitute infringement where it does not cause confusion. And the revised law permits a fine of up to five times the illegal turnover where a registered trademark is used in a misleading manner and illegal business turnover exceeds RMB 50,000, with failure to rectify misleading use within the prescribed period resulting in revocation of the registered trademark. The latter is a compliance point about how your own registered marks are used in the Chinese market, not only about third parties.

What does this development not settle?

Almost everything about implementation. What is available is practitioner commentary on the adopted amendment, not the statute text or implementing rules; CNIPA’s implementing regulations, examination guidelines and the transitional treatment of pending applications and oppositions are not yet published.

So the two provisions with the greatest capacity to disrupt a portfolio — the ex officio non-use cancellation power and the bad-faith fines — are, for now, powers on paper whose exercise cannot be predicted. Whether ex officio cancellation is deployed as a broad register-cleaning campaign or reserved for conspicuous cases is unknown. Whether the RMB 100,000 fine attaches to genuine squatters only, or reaches over-broad defensive programmes by legitimate brand owners, is unknown. Nor is it settled how an opposition published shortly before 1 January 2027 will be treated.

It is also worth noting that commentaries in the field describe the same amendment with slightly different emphasis, and none reproduces article text. Treat article numbers and thresholds in this piece as signposts to be confirmed against the official text and the implementing rules when those appear, not as a substitute for them.

What should you actually do before 1 January 2027?

Three things, in this order.

First, move China trademark watching to at least monthly cadence, with a named internal owner, so that a two-month opposition window can be met without heroics. Test the chain once before January on a live publication.

Second, audit the defensive registrations. For each mark unused in China for three years or approaching that, ask whether use evidence exists — including online use on e-commerce platforms and social media, which the revised law expressly recognises. Where it does, collect and date it now. Where it does not, take a deliberate decision about whether the registration is worth defending, rather than leaving it to be decided for you.

Third, re-paper agency instructions so that each filing instruction carries a stated commercial basis, reflecting the new liability on agents who accept bad-faith filings. Then diarise a review for when CNIPA’s implementing regulations and examination guidelines are published, because that is when the two open questions on this list will begin to have answers.