SHORT ANSWER
U.S. firms vetting a Chinese trademark agency almost always ask the same eight things: filing authority at CNIPA, who actually does the work, whether the file can be carried past CNIPA into court, conflicts, client data, fee structure, non-solicitation, and docketing discipline.
The three answers that matter most: a foreign applicant must file through a lawfully established Chinese trademark agency (Trademark Law, Article 18); a trademark agency alone cannot appear in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, so ask early whether the same firm covers both stages; and the deadlines that end files — 15 days to seek review of a refusal, 2 months to answer a non-use cancellation — are not extendable.
This page exists because the verification step is the same every time. Someone recommends us, the referring firm needs to satisfy itself before it puts a client’s mark into a stranger’s hands, and the same eight questions arrive by email. Below are those questions, why each one is asked, and how we answer.
# | The question | The one-line answer |
|---|---|---|
1 | Are you authorised to file at CNIPA, and how do I check? | Yes — and the check takes two minutes on CNIPA’s public register of recorded agencies. |
2 | Who does the work, and in what language? | A named handler, with instructions confirmed in English before anything is filed. |
3 | Can you carry the file past CNIPA into court? | Yes — but this is the question most firms forget to ask, and the answer is not always yes. |
4 | Do you also act for squatters? | No. Article 19(4) forbids it, and the register is searchable by agency. |
5 | What happens to my client’s data? | Only what filing requires crosses the border. Privilege does not travel — plan for that. |
6 | Where do surprise bills come from? | Subclass expansion, amendment notices, and investigation costs in cancellations. |
7 | Will you go around me to my client? | Written non-solicitation; all correspondence addressed to the referring firm. |
8 | How do you docket? | Against five non-extendable deadlines, listed at the end of this page. |
1. Are you authorised to file at CNIPA, and how do I verify it?
Statutory basis. Trademark Law, Article 18: a foreigner or foreign enterprise applying for trademark registration or handling other trademark matters in China shall entrust a lawfully established trademark agency. There is no self-filing route for a foreign applicant without a habitual residence or place of business in China.
CNIPA maintains a public record of trademark agencies（商标代理机构备案）. Any agency you are considering should be on it, and the record is searchable by agency name — which also lets you see what that agency has been filing.
Our details, so you can check rather than take our word: Sunshine Intellectual Property International Co., Ltd.（北京三聚阳光知识产权服务集团有限公司）, established 2000, roughly 600 IP professionals, headquartered in the Zhongguancun Intellectual Property Building, Haidian District, Beijing. Ask us for our recordal particulars and check them against the register before you instruct. Any agency that hesitates at that request has told you something useful.
The register is a live screening tool rather than a formality. In 2025, Chinese authorities added 59 bad-faith agencies and practitioners to the published blacklist. If a prospective agent is not on the register, or is on the wrong list, you find out before you file, not after.
2. Who actually does the work, and in what language?
The risk in a cross-border referral is rarely competence. It is the handoff: an English instruction letter translated once, converted into a Chinese filing, and never checked back against the original. By the time the divergence surfaces, it is in a published application.
Two things to establish before you instruct. First, ask for a named handler and their qualification, not a general mailbox. Second, ask whether the specification you approved in English will be read back to you in English after it is mapped to the Chinese standard list — because that mapping is where meaning shifts, and it happens after your instruction, not before.
There is no slack in the timetable for a second round of clarification. CNIPA examined 6.68 million trademark applications in 2024 and approved 71.2% of them; substantive examination now averages about four months and the full registration cycle has been compressed to roughly seven. A question asked after filing is a question asked too late.
3. Can you carry the file past CNIPA?
This is the question most referring firms skip, and it is the one most likely to produce an unwanted second handoff.
A Chinese trademark agency handles proceedings before CNIPA: filing, responses, review of refusal, opposition, invalidation, cancellation. When a CNIPA decision is appealed, the case becomes administrative litigation before the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, and litigation requires attorneys. Some agencies have an affiliated law firm; some do not, and will pass your file to a third party at exactly the point where continuity is worth the most.
Appeals from CNIPA are not an edge case. Chinese courts accepted 27,451 first-instance administrative IP cases in 2025, up 31.67% year on year, and 24,334 of them — 88.65% — were trademark cases. For a contested mark, the court stage is the normal second half of the file.
Ask the question in this form: “If CNIPA refuses and we appeal, does your firm appear at the Beijing IP Court, or does the file move?” Both answers can be acceptable — a clean, disclosed handoff to named litigation counsel is a normal and perfectly workable arrangement. An unexpected answer at month fourteen is not.
Our answer is procedural rather than promotional: before you instruct, we tell you in writing which entity would act at each stage — the CNIPA proceedings, and the Beijing IP Court if it goes that far. You should not have to infer it from a website, and you should not discover it after a refusal.
4. Do you also act for the other side?
The concern behind this question is specific: that a Chinese agency filing your client’s marks is also filing marks for squatters, or worse, filing on its own account.
Statutory basis. Trademark Law, Article 19(4): a trademark agency may not apply to register trademarks other than those for its own agency services. Article 4, as amended in 2019: an application for registration made in bad faith and not for the purpose of use shall be refused. The draft amendment now before the National People’s Congress raises penalties on agencies that assist bad-faith filers to as much as RMB 200,000 for the institution and RMB 100,000 for the individual practitioner.
In trademark work the conflict, when there is one, nearly always surfaces at the same moment: the clearance search. Our practice is to deal with it there rather than later.
- If the pre-filing search turns up a blocking prior mark that belongs to a client of ours, we tell you, and we set out the options for getting past it.
- If that is not acceptable to you, we tell you plainly that we cannot act on the matter. We would rather decline at the search stage than carry a file we cannot run at full strength.
- Where you would rather screen in advance, give us the parties you do not want us acting against and we check against that list before taking instructions.
The base rate is low — trademark conflicts of this kind arise rarely — but the value of the answer is in the rule, not the frequency. And because filings are searchable by agency on the public record, this is one of the few due-diligence items in a cross-border referral that you can verify independently rather than accept on assurance.
5. What happens to my client’s data?
For an ordinary trademark filing, what actually crosses the border is short: the applicant’s name and address as they appear on the incorporation document, a copy of that document with a Chinese translation, a signed power of attorney, the mark file, the goods and services list, and — where priority is claimed — a certified copy of the priority document. Strategy memoranda and privileged analysis do not need to travel.
Set the division at the start, not during a dispute
The workable arrangement is the simple one: legal analysis stays with you; the agency file holds what filing requires. It costs nothing to set up at the beginning of an engagement and it is awkward to retrofit once something has gone wrong.
Ask, in the same conversation, what is retained and for how long, and whether any part of the file sits with a subcontractor. China’s Personal Information Protection Law and Data Security Law apply to whatever does cross the border, and keeping the transfer minimal and specified is the cleanest answer to both.
6. How are fees structured, and where do surprise bills come from?
Two components: the CNIPA official fee, and the agency fee. Neither is where the surprises live. Surprises come from three places, and all three can be quoted in advance if you ask.
- Subclass expansion. China divides every Nice class into subclasses, and coverage is decided subclass by subclass. A specification that reads as one class in the U.S. can require materially wider coverage in China. This should be priced at the search stage, not discovered at filing. (Detailed in The five formality problems that delay foreign applications at CNIPA.)
- Amendment notices. CNIPA requires goods and services descriptions in national applications to conform strictly to the standard names in the Chinese classification. Non-standard wording draws a notification of amendment and costs a cycle.
- Investigation in cancellation actions. This one changed recently and catches most people.
Since early 2025, CNIPA has required the petitioner in a three-year non-use cancellation（撤三）to file preliminary evidence of non-use with the petition: information on the registrant’s business scope and operating status, search results from at least three platforms with screenshots of five consecutive result pages each, and — where the registrant shows as actively operating — an on-site investigation report from its business premises. Where an office action issues, the petitioner has 30 days to supplement or the petition is rejected. That is an investigation budget, not a filing fee, and it should appear as its own line.
7. Will you go around me to my client?
Asked less often than it is worried about, so here it is in plain terms: we do not go around the referring firm, and absent your instruction we do not contact your client directly. Correspondence is addressed to you, and it stays that way for the life of the file.
We put that in the engagement terms rather than leaving it in an introductory call, because a promise that exists only in a call is worth what it costs.
8. How do you docket, and which deadlines actually end files?
Most Chinese trademark deadlines cannot be extended. That single fact should shape how a referral is docketed on both sides — the referring firm should hold its own diary entries rather than rely entirely on the agent’s.
Deadline | Period | Runs from | Basis and note |
|---|---|---|---|
Opposition | 3 months | Preliminary publication | Article 33. Not extendable. The draft amendment submitted on 22 Dec 2025 proposes cutting this to two months. |
Review of refusal | 15 days | Service of the refusal | Article 34. Not extendable. With electronic service the window is commonly calculated as 30 days from transmission; for Madrid designations, 30 days from WIPO’s notification. Confirm the exact date with the agent — this is the deadline most often miscalculated. |
Non-use cancellation response | 2 months | Service of the notice | Article 49 and Article 66 of the Implementing Regulations. Not extendable. Evidence of use must already exist — it cannot be created inside the window. |
Review of a cancellation decision | 15 days | Receipt of the decision | Set out in CNIPA’s own filing guide for non-use cancellation. Not extendable. |
Invalidation, relative grounds | 5 years | Date of registration | Article 45. No time limit under Article 44 for absolute grounds or registration obtained by deceptive or other improper means, nor against a bad-faith registration of a well-known mark. |
Appeal of a CNIPA decision | 30 days | Service of the decision | To the Beijing Intellectual Property Court. Requires attorneys. |
Decision periods on CNIPA’s side, for planning: refusal review and non-use cancellation, nine months from filing, extendable by three; opposition and invalidation on relative grounds, twelve months, extendable by six.
One thing worth knowing before you plan a filing strategy
CNIPA and the Beijing courts have moved away from accepting letters of consent and coexistence agreements as a way to overcome a cited earlier mark. China now stands out among the TM5 offices as the one that, in practice, does not recognise them.
This matters at the strategy stage rather than the refusal stage. A clearance plan built on “if we are cited, we will get a consent letter” — routine in the United States and the European Union — has no reliable equivalent in China. The citation has to be cleared another way, by non-use cancellation, invalidation, or a negotiated assignment, or the mark has to change. Deciding that before filing costs a search. Deciding it after refusal costs the filing date, and in a first-to-file country the filing date is usually the thing you were buying.
Questions we would ask in your position
- Show me your record on CNIPA’s agency register, and tell me your agency code.
- Who is the named handler on my file, and what is their qualification?
- Will the final Chinese specification be read back to me in English before filing?
- If this goes to the Beijing IP Court, do you appear, or does the file move?
- What is quoted, what is estimated, and what is not yet quoted at all?
Sunshine Intellectual Property International Co., Ltd. has acted for foreign rights holders before CNIPA since 2000. If you are evaluating Chinese agents for a client portfolio and want these answers in writing for your conflicts file, we will provide them.
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 South Road, Haidian District, Beijing · marketing@ipsunshine.com · https://www.ipsunshine.com
Published 2026-09-22 at https://www.ipsunshine.com/en/insights/questions-to-ask-chinese-trademark-agency. 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.
