Insight · 2026-08-10
If you come from a use-based system, “we used it first” feels like ownership. China's register does not care. Here is how recovery actually works — and why the answer is usually evidence, not outrage.
By HUANG Guowen 黄国文 — Director, Cross-border Department · Partner
In the United States and other use-based systems, using a mark in commerce creates rights. In China, registration creates rights — use creates visibility. If you have manufactured here, exhibited here, or negotiated with a distributor here, you have been visible for longer than you think, and there is an industry of people who read foreign trade press and file brands that have not arrived yet. By the time you notice, the register already has an owner of record. It just isn't you.
Which door is open depends on where the mark stands. If it is published but not yet registered, you oppose — a hard window of three months from publication, dropping to two from 1 January 2027, as we wrote earlier. If it is registered, you seek invalidation — the main route back, and the one where their bad faith and your prior-use record do the work. If it has sat registered and unused for three years, a non-use cancellation is often the cheapest move on the board — the registrant, not you, must prove genuine use, and hoarders usually cannot.
Three piles of paper decide these cases. Yours: first-use records touching China — orders, exhibition materials, distributor correspondence, customs and OEM records, dated and boring. Theirs, part one: the pattern — portfolios stuffed with other people's brands, marks filed in batches, resale offers; a resale offer tells you precisely what the registration was for. Theirs, part two: the absence — no products, no invoices, no genuine trade under the mark. Start assembling all three before you decide the fight is hopeless, and before you negotiate — because the strength of that file is your negotiating position.
Sometimes a negotiated transfer is the rational exit — fastest certainty, known price. But walking in with no assessed case pays the squatter's asking price and finances the next batch of filings. The sequence that protects you is: evidence first, then a validity assessment, then — if the numbers still favour it — a negotiation conducted with the invalidation file sitting visibly on the table.
One filing, made before you become visible, avoids this entire article — file the Chinese-character version while you are at it, because the market will otherwise choose one for you. And after filing, watch the register: with the opposition window shrinking to two months, monitoring is the difference between having options and reading news. If it already happened, start here →
General information, not advice on a specific matter. Author: HUANG Guowen, Director of the Cross-border Department — checked against the primary sources linked above.
