China became the first country in the world to reach 5 million active patents, with the number of new applications topping the number for six consecutive years.
According to an announcement by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) over the weekend, China currently has more than 5 million valid patents, and has ranked first for 6 consecutive years in the number of international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
Also according to statistics, among the world’s top 5,000 brands, China’s brand value reached 1.81 trillion USD, ranking second in the world. The direct output value of the products reached nearly 970 billion yuan (137 billion USD).
Robot models from Unitree Robotics at a technology event in Beijing. Image: China Daily
To achieve this speed, CNIPA said it has introduced many major reforms, such as adjusting the appraisal process according to the actual needs of creators, prioritizing high-value applications and speeding up processing times through a centralized and fast mechanism. In the first five months of the year alone, the agency processed more than 100,000 patent applications quickly, conducted thousands of priority examinations, and increased flexibility in managing the examination process.
In June, CNIPA said that China achieved 15.3 high-value patents per 10,000 people, exceeding the expected target of the 14th Five-Year Plan. The number of valid patents in China’s strategic emerging industries exceeded 1.4 million and maintained a high growth rate.
In the patent portfolio, China’s high-value patent reserves in key fields such as AI, robotics, advanced manufacturing, integrated circuits, biomedicine, and new energy are continuously being consolidated, helping to accelerate the transition from “quantitative accumulation” to “qualitative improvement”, laying the foundation for high-level science and technology autonomy.
Besides, the efficiency of converting power from patents to economic efficiency is also continuously improved. The total annual import and export value of China’s intellectual property rights fees this year reached nearly 400 billion yuan (56 billion USD).
In the GII 2025 Global Innovation Index report of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) published in September, China entered the global top 10 for the first time, as well as owning 24 of the world’s top 100 innovation clusters, leading globally for the third consecutive year with the pioneering Shenzhen – Hong Kong – Guangzhou innovation axis.
According to Professor Tieu Canh of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), China is becoming a “hot spot” for inventions, mainly thanks to the wave of foreign experts and scientists choosing to return to their homeland, the destination being leading research institutes. In addition, domestic enterprises also increased R&D investment, contributing to a sudden increase in the number of intellectual property applications.
Ding Li, a researcher at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, assessed that China’s patents are increasingly high quality, leading the world in their field. For example, Huawei’s 5G core technology invention solved the problem of low latency in the industrial Internet field and was included in the international standard in 2018. Since then, the technology has been deployed on more than one million 5G base stations worldwide.
CNIPA said it has completed revised guidelines for patent evaluation, expected to take effect from early 2026. Along with that, the agency also made new proposals on sanctioning intellectual property violations, including failure to strictly comply and manage sources, failure to strictly control quality, failure to publicly notify violations…