Filing is made by a CNIPA-registered trademark agency. We are not a trademark agent and do not file in our own name. Trademark agencies must be registered with the China National Intellectual Property Administration; a foreign applicant with no place of business in China must file through one (Trademark Law art. 18). Our work is the strategy, the reading of the search, the coordination and the translation.
The pattern we see most. A company ships to China for two years through a distributor, decides to formalise, and discovers the distributor — or a professional squatter watching customs and trade-fair data — registered the mark in year one. The brand is then negotiating to buy back its own name, from a position of no leverage.
The part outsiders get wrong: subclasses
China divides each of the 45 international classes into subclasses, and marks in different subclasses of the same class are often treated as non-conflicting. Filing “class 25, clothing” the way you would in most other jurisdictions can leave whole subclasses — footwear, headwear, a specific garment type — open for someone else to register. Most squatting that looks like bad luck is actually a subclass gap. Choosing the coverage is the skilled part of the job; the filing itself is administrative.
What we do
Clearance search
Whether your mark, or something close enough to block it, is already on the CNIPA register — before you spend anything on filing.
Class & subclass strategy
The classes you trade in, the subclasses that actually protect them, and the defensive filings worth making — including a Chinese-character version of your brand.
Your Chinese name
If you do not choose a Chinese-character brand name, the market will choose one for you and someone else will register it. We help pick one that reads well and files cleanly.
Agency coordination
We brief the CNIPA-registered agency that files, then track office actions, publication and the certificate — and explain each step in English as it happens. The filing is theirs; keeping it on the rails is ours.
Cost and timeline
| Stage | Typical timing | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Clearance search & strategy (our fee) | 2–5 working days | From US$180 |
| Filing (per class) (agency + official) | Days once documents are in | CNIPA ¥270 official fee + agency fee US$280–420 |
| Formal examination & preliminary approval | ≈4–6 months | — |
| Publication / opposition window | 3 months | — |
| Registration certificate | ≈9–12 months total | — |
Official fee per CNIPA e-filing schedule; covers up to 10 items per class, ¥27 per item beyond that. Market ranges verified July 2026.
If your mark is already taken
It is not automatically over. The realistic routes, in the order we usually assess them:
- Opposition — within the three-month publication window, before the squatter’s mark registers.
- Invalidation on bad faith — the 2026 amendments strengthen CNIPA’s ability to refuse and cancel applications filed with no genuine intent to use, and enforcement against bulk squatting and hoarding has been explicitly tightened.
- Non-use cancellation — available once a mark has been registered for three years without genuine commercial use, and CNIPA has raised the evidentiary bar for proving use.
- Buy it — sometimes the fastest commercial answer, and we will say so rather than sell you a three-year fight.
These are contested proceedings. We assess the position, gather the evidence and coordinate the registered agency or IP lawyer who runs them — we do not run them ourselves.
