The Supreme People’s Court commemorated the first Trademark Law of the People’s Republic of China in August 1982, see here. Remember 1982? It was the year when Deng Xiaoping was in power at the Zhongnanhai, Reagan in the White House and Brezhnev in the Kremlin. Deng had set out a new course for China in 1979 and started to experiment with free market capitalism in Special Economic Zones, such as Shenzhen. Competition becomes problematic if one cannot distinguish the products or services from one undertaking to those of the next undertaking. Trademark law was promulgated before the People’s Republic got a patent law in 1984 and copyright law in 1990, and before China came up with the General Principles of Civil Law in 1986, and before it became a union member of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1984, see here. The Trademark Law was revised in 1993 and 2001.
Already in 2002 China had most trademark applications in the world, which were 300,000. This number has risen to 10 million trademark applications at the end of June, 2012. More interestingly, China has 7.17 million registered and 6.09 million valid trademark registrations by the end of June, 2012. Read more here.
It’s still a tiny 0,55 percent of the population of 1.3 billion people who has registered a trademark, but the ascendance of branding protected by trademarks in China is a great development, that can be the ax to the root of counterfeiting. Congratulations go to the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) who is in charge of trademarks in the PRC.