Patents are an unusual subtype of IPR in China because administrative agencies and courts of law both provide rationalized enforcement in this domain. Three factors explain this outcome. First and foremost, the administrative enforcement field is not crowded by the presence of multiple agencies with overlapping (and poorly defined) enforcement jurisdictions. A single agency – the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) – is charged with providing administrative enforcement. In contrast to copyrights and trademarks, the technical complexity of patents presents a barrier to the entry of multiple administrative enforcers. This has allowed simple and predictable enforcement arrangements to emerge and to become institutionalized. Second, the SIPO functions as a quasi-centralized bureaucracy, thus increasing the accountability of subnational enforcers to the center. Third, enforcement responsibility is clearly divided between the SIPO and the courts. The SIPO has exclusive jurisdiction over enforcement for some types of patents; for others, where the SIPO and the courts share enforcement responsibility, the Patent Law unambiguously delineates their respective mandates. Overall, patent enforcement is consistent, transparent, and fair.

Why has high-quality enforcement emerged for patents but not for trademarks or copyrights? First, patents are a priority for the central leadership. Ever since Deng Xiaoping included science and technology among the Four Modernizations, Chinese leaders have made a special effort to promote indigenous inventiveness. Second, and more importantly, prior to the early 2000s, there was little foreign or domestic pressure to increase the volume of patent enforcement.