China’s IP landscape has changed. Have our perceptions?
Mention intellectual property and China in the same sentence to a group of Kiwi exporters and you still sometimes hear a familiar response. "Why bother registering it? You can't enforce IP in China anyway." Twenty years ago, there was plenty of evidence to support that view. Today, it deserves a rethink.
The first thing to remember is that intellectual property risk is not uniquely Chinese. If a Kiwi company develops something novel, builds a successful brand or creates technology that customers want, sooner or later competitors will notice. That is capitalism. The better the idea, the more interesting you become. The commercial response is equally universal: secure your rights and, where necessary, enforce them.
Those rights might include trademarks, patents, copyright, registered designs, plant variety rights, trade secrets and know-how. Protection also comes from good contracts, confidentiality arrangements, and sensible control over who gets access to what. China is no exception. What has changed considerably is China's ability — and increasingly its own economic need — to protect those rights.
How did we get here?
It helps to think about China's IP journey in three broad phases.
Phase one: laying the foundations — roughly 1980 to 2010
Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening transformed China from a largely planned economy into an increasingly market-oriented manufacturing powerhouse. Foreign capital, technology and know-how poured in. China became the factory of the world and hundreds of millions of people experienced extraordinary improvements in living standards.
But nobody should romanticise the journey. Technology transfer, reverse engineering, counterfeiting and trademark squatting were very real problems. China's first-to-file trademark system also created opportunities for people to register foreign brands before their legitimate owners arrived. At its worst, trademark squatting almost became a cottage industry.
This is where many of today's perceptions of Chinese IP protection were formed — often for perfectly legitimate reasons. But China itself was changing. WTO accession in 2001 accelerated the modernisation of commercial laws and institutions. China's Five-Year Plans increasingly shifted the development conversation away from simply producing more towards science, technology, efficiency and indigenous innovation.
China didn't simply want to manufacture other people's inventions. It wanted to create its own. The development of China's National Intellectual Property Strategy and the wider policy focus on "indigenous innovation" reflected that transition. Patents, Chinese brands, proprietary technology and other forms of IP increasingly became part of China's own economic strategy.
Phase two: building the machinery — roughly 2011 to 2016
This is when the system started becoming much more recognisably modern. China strengthened its legal framework and developed increasingly specialised enforcement institutions. Dedicated intellectual property courts were established in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with jurisdiction over technically complex matters including patents and technical know-how.
At the same time, registrations exploded. The approximate numbers illustrate the scale. By the end of this period China had more than 12 million registered trademarks, while patent ownership had also increased several-fold. Litigation followed. Patent litigation increased dramatically and China became one of the world's busiest jurisdictions for patent disputes. Trademark litigation expanded even faster, as did copyright enforcement.
Companies generally don't spend significant amounts of money on lawyers and court proceedings unless they believe there is something commercially worthwhile at the other end. China's IP courts increasingly offered injunctions to stop infringing activity, compensation for losses and, as the legal framework developed further, increasingly meaningful damages.
IP enforcement was moving beyond occasional symbolic cases towards real commercial outcomes for real businesses. And much of the litigation wasn't foreign companies fighting Chinese companies. It was Chinese companies suing other Chinese companies. That distinction is fundamental to understanding what happened next.
Phase three: enforcement becomes commercially serious — 2017 to today
China today operates at or near the technological frontier in areas including electric vehicles, batteries, renewable energy, telecommunications, drones, advanced manufacturing and robotics. That fundamentally changes the incentives. If Chinese companies spend billions developing technology, brands, software and patents, China cannot operate indefinitely on the basis that copying somebody else's intellectual property carries no consequences.
China needs IP enforcement for China. Its Patent Law, Trademark Law and Copyright Law have all been strengthened through successive amendments. Punitive damages are now available for serious intentional infringement across important categories of IP. The institutional machinery has developed as well: specialist courts and tribunals, administrative enforcement, customs enforcement, mediation and criminal prosecution all form parts of today's system.
Recent official statistics give some indication of its scale. In 2025 alone, Chinese prosecutors initiated prosecutions in more than 9,000 criminal IP cases involving approximately 19,000 people. Chinese authorities were also dealing with tens of thousands of administrative patent and trademark disputes. There is no obvious sign that China is losing interest in enforcement.
In many fields China has moved from technology recipient to innovator and global competitor. Chinese EV, battery, solar, telecommunications, robotics and technology companies don't particularly want their own IP reverse-engineered. That has nothing to do with being nice to foreign companies. It has everything to do with Chinese innovation, investment, and prosperity.
What about foreign companies?
The old assumption that a foreign company simply can't win against a Chinese company also deserves more scrutiny. China's IP authorities now explicitly talk about equal protection for domestic and foreign-invested companies. Recent CNIPA data shows substantial numbers of foreign patents and trademarks continue to be registered in China, while the government has developed dedicated mechanisms for dealing with foreign-related IP disputes.
Does that mean every foreign company wins? Of course not. But foreign companies do successfully enforce IP rights through Chinese courts and administrative channels.
Kiwi companies are already testing the system
This isn't just an interesting macroeconomic story. Kiwi exporters have actually been enforcing their rights in China.
Zespri provides perhaps the clearest example. In 2025, the Wuhan Intermediate People's Court found infringement of Zespri's rights relating to unauthorised planting and sale of its Gold kiwifruit variety. The court ordered infringing plant material be removed and awarded Zespri damages. Zespri has also pursued counterfeit use of its trademarks, with Chinese authorities prosecuting people involved in producing and distributing counterfeit Zespri labels.
Rockit Global provides another recent example. It has successfully pursued unauthorised propagation and sale of its apple variety, securing a first-instance judgment requiring infringing plant material to be rendered non-viable and recognising compensation associated with the infringement.
These cases don't prove that enforcing IP in China is easy. It isn't. If the old assumption that IP cannot be enforced in China is increasingly outdated, the next question is more practical: what should a Kiwi exporter actually do?
That is where Part Two starts.