Short answer
Three routes exist, and which one is available to you is decided by a calendar rather than by the merits. Opposition: three months from the squatter’s preliminary publication. Invalidation: five years from registration on relative grounds; no time limit on absolute grounds or where registration was obtained by deceptive means. Non-use cancellation: available once the registration is three years old.
The willingness to cancel is real — Chinese authorities reported action against 427,000 bad-faith trademark registrations across 2025. What has become harder is proof. Since early 2025 the party seeking a non-use cancellation must file investigation evidence with the petition, and a successful invalidation still leaves the mark vacant rather than yours: the draft amendment now before the legislature does not include a mechanism to transfer a squatted mark to its rightful owner.
Which window you are in
Everything else in this article follows from one question: what is the current status of the registration standing in your way? Find that first, on CNIPA’s trademark search, before spending money on analysis.
Route | Window | What you must show | CNIPA decision |
|---|---|---|---|
Opposition 异议 | 3 months from preliminary publication (Art. 33) | Prior rights, prior use with influence, an agent or business relationship, or bad faith | 12 months, extendable by 6 |
Invalidation, relative grounds 无效宣告 | 5 years from registration (Art. 45) | Prior rights under Arts. 13, 15, 16, 30, 31 or 32 | 12 months, extendable by 6 |
Invalidation, absolute grounds | No time limit (Art. 44) | Registration obtained by deceptive or other improper means; or a bad-faith registration of a well-known mark | 9 months, extendable by 3 |
Non-use cancellation 撤三 | Any time after the mark has been registered 3 years (Art. 49) | That the mark has not been used in mainland China for three consecutive years — plus, since 2025, preliminary evidence filed with the petition | 9 months, extendable by 3 |
Missing the opposition window is not fatal — invalidation covers most of the same grounds. Missing the five-year invalidation window on relative grounds usually is, unless the facts reach Article 44 or the mark qualifies as well known.
What “bad faith” means in Chinese practice
Bad faith is not one provision. It is a set of them, and the one that fits your facts determines what you have to prove.
Article | Reaches | What you need |
|---|---|---|
Art. 4 | Applications in bad faith and not for the purpose of use | Evidence of hoarding or filing beyond any plausible business need — filing volume, class spread, absence of trade. Applied by examiners on their own initiative, not only on a party’s objection. |
Art. 15 | Filings by an agent, representative, distributor or contracting party | The relationship. This is the strongest position a brand owner can be in, and the most common squatting fact pattern: a former distributor or a factory registers the mark it was manufacturing under. |
Art. 32 | Pre-emptive registration by unfair means of a mark already in use with certain influence | Use in China before the squatter’s filing date, with evidence that the mark had acquired some recognition — and that the squatter knew of it. |
Art. 13 | Reproduction of a well-known mark | Recognition by the relevant public in China. A high bar, but it unlocks cross-class protection and removes the five-year limit against a bad-faith filer. |
Art. 44 | Registration obtained by deceptive or other improper means | Conduct that damages public order rather than only your interests — typically large-scale squatting. No time limit. |
CNIPA’s examination guidance sets out the typical situations in which a filing is treated as bad faith under Article 4, including hoarding, filings that obviously exceed normal production or business needs, and large-scale copying of established marks. The draft amendment submitted on 22 December 2025 would put this test into the statute directly and would explicitly reach purely defensive full-class and multi-class filings.
Non-use cancellation: the hardest-working tool, and the one that changed
Article 49 lets anyone apply to cancel a registration that has not been used in mainland China for three consecutive years without justified reason. You do not need standing, you do not need prior rights, and you do not need to prove bad faith. That is why it is the workhorse: most squatted marks were never used, because they were never meant to be used.
The outcomes bear that out. Across 2019–2022, total and partial cancellation rates in non-use proceedings ran at 82.5% to 82.8%, with registrations maintained in only 17.2% to 17.8% of cases. Volume has climbed with the success rate: non-use cancellations at the review stage rose from 13,413 in 2019 to 21,393 in 2023, a 59% increase in four years.
What changed in 2025 is the cost of getting to that outcome. The burden no longer starts with the registrant: the petitioner must now file preliminary investigation evidence with the petition, and that requirement sits in CNIPA’s own published filing guide rather than in practice alone.
Primary source. The Trademark Office’s official filing guide for non-use cancellation, updated 26 May 2025, requires the applicant to attach preliminary investigation evidence that the mark has not been used for three consecutive years without justified reason — “such as online search results and market investigation reports”. The guide goes on to enumerate what counts: the registrant’s business scope and operating or subsistence status; market investigation of the mark itself; and evidence gathered from official websites, WeChat official accounts, e-commerce platforms and on-site business premises. Legal basis: Trademark Law Article 49 and Article 66 of the Implementing Regulations.
What the guide requires, and what examiners actually ask for 撤三举证
The published guide sets the floor. In practice examiners ask for more, and a petition assembled only to the wording of the guide will draw an office action.
Element | The published filing guide | What examiners ask for in practice |
|---|---|---|
Registrant status | Business scope or scope of operations, operating or subsistence status, registration particulars | The same, taken from the official corporate register rather than the registrant’s own website |
Search evidence | “Online search results” | At least three separate platforms — typically a search engine, an e-commerce platform and a social platform — with screenshots of five consecutive result pages from each |
Market investigation | “Market investigation reports”; evidence from official websites, WeChat official accounts, e-commerce platforms and on-site business premises | Where the registrant’s status shows as actively operating, an on-site investigation report and supporting evidence from its business or office premises |
If it falls short | — | An office action issues and the petitioner has 30 days to supplement, failing which the petition is rejected |
The right-hand column is practice rather than published rule. CNIPA’s public notices do not specify platform counts or page counts; those thresholds have been established case by case since early 2025 and are corroborated by practitioners handling these filings. Confirm the current requirement with your agent before budgeting.
One further deadline worth diarising while you are here: a party dissatisfied with a cancellation decision may apply to CNIPA for review within 15 days of receiving it. That window is not extendable either.
Budget implication
This is an investigation cost, not a filing cost, and it should be quoted as its own line. A screenshot of a single search — accepted practice until 2025 — is no longer sufficient. Where a portfolio strategy contemplated firing non-use cancellations at several blocking marks at once, the arithmetic has changed materially since 2024.
The tool cuts both ways, and this is the part foreign owners miss
Everything above applies to your own Chinese registrations. If you filed defensively across classes you do not trade in — which is exactly what most foreign brands are advised to do, and which the draft amendment now proposes to discourage — those registrations are cancellable by anyone once they are three years old.
China held 50.816 million valid registered trademarks at the end of 2025, up from 47.62 million a year earlier. In a register that crowded, a dormant registration in a subclass someone else wants is a target, and squatters routinely file non-use cancellations against foreign registrants to clear a path for their own applications.
Evidence of use that survives, and evidence that does not
Holds up | Fails |
|---|---|
Dated invoices showing the mark and the specific registered goods | Materials the registrant produced itself with no third-party corroboration |
Chinese-language advertising, catalogues and packaging in circulation | A single symbolic transaction, or token use arranged to survive a challenge |
Licence agreements, plus evidence the licensee actually traded | Sales only within the group or to related parties |
E-commerce listings, customs declarations, distribution contracts | Preparatory activity — samples, moulds, unlaunched packaging — without market circulation |
Use of the mark substantially as registered, on the registered goods, inside mainland China | Use of a materially altered form, on adjacent goods, or only outside the mainland |
Five tests are applied: timeframe (within the relevant three years), territory (mainland China), form (no significant alteration), goods (as registered), and authorisation (by or with the registrant’s consent). Evidence must already exist when the notice arrives — the two-month response window is not long enough to create it.
What is changing, and what deliberately is not
A draft amendment to the Trademark Law was submitted to the National People’s Congress on 22 December 2025. As at September 2026 it has not been enacted, so everything in this section is proposal rather than law. The provisions relevant to squatting:
- Filings beyond normal business needs become an express ground of refusal, expressly reaching purely defensive full-class and multi-class registrations.
- Penalties rise. Fines for bad-faith filings that cause adverse effects increase to as much as RMB 100,000; agencies assisting bad-faith filers face up to RMB 200,000, and individual practitioners up to RMB 100,000.
- The opposition window shortens from three months to two.
- CNIPA gains power to cancel generic or unused registrations on its own initiative.
The omission that matters most to you
The draft does not include the mechanism, floated in the 2023 consultation draft, for transferring an invalidated squatted mark to its rightful owner. Invalidation and cancellation therefore still end in the same place they do today: the mark becomes vacant, not yours.
The practical consequence is a sequencing rule. File your own application before or alongside the challenge, so that when the blocking registration falls, you are the party in line behind it. Winning a cancellation and then discovering that a third party filed in the interval is a recoverable mistake, but it costs another eighteen months.
If your own application is refused while the challenge runs
The sequencing above creates a collision you should plan for rather than be surprised by: you file, the squatted mark is cited against your application, and you are refused before your cancellation or invalidation has been decided. There is a mechanism for this, but it is narrower than most foreign applicants assume.
Examination itself cannot be suspended. Suspension exists only in review proceedings — review of refusal, review of opposition, and invalidation — under rules CNIPA has operated since 13 June 2023. Seven sets of circumstances require suspension; three more sit in the examiner’s discretion. In a review of refusal the applicant must request suspension in writing, and the examiner then decides whether to accept it.
So the practical sequence is: expect the refusal, file the review of refusal inside the fifteen-day window, and ask for suspension in that filing, setting out the pending action against the cited mark. Treat it as a request rather than an entitlement, and plan for the possibility that it is declined and the review is decided on the record as it stands.
What to do, in order
1.Pull the record. Registration number, class and subclass, filing date, registration date, current status, and the registrant’s identity. Everything downstream depends on these five fields.
2.Establish the relationship. Is the registrant a former distributor, agent, supplier or contracting party? If so, Article 15 is available and your position is far stronger than a general bad-faith argument.
3.Check your own evidence of prior use in China — dated, in Chinese, and before the squatter’s filing date. This decides whether Article 32 is realistic.
4.File your application before, or at the same time as, the challenge — and expect it to be refused over the very mark you are challenging. The review of refusal is where you ask for suspension.
5.Choose the route by the calendar, using the first table. Where more than one is open, non-use cancellation is usually the cheapest and fastest first move against a dormant mark, and invalidation the stronger move where the relationship or the copying is documented.
6.Record with Customs once you hold a registration, and keep the recordal current. It is the cheapest standing protection available.
This page describes general practice as at September 2026 and is not legal advice on any specific mark. Sunshine Intellectual Property International Co., Ltd. has acted for foreign brand owners before CNIPA since 2000.
Sunshine Intellectual Property International Co., Ltd.
北京三聚阳光知识产权服务集团有限公司
Zhongguancun Intellectual Property Building, 21 Haidian Road South, Haidian District, Beijing · marketing@ipsunshine.com · https://www.ipsunshine.com
Published 2026-09-24 at https://www.ipsunshine.com/en/insights/china-trademark-squatting-bad-faith-non-use-cancellation. This note describes general practice in the People’s Republic of China as at September 2026 and is not legal advice on any particular matter.
