Business Question 

A brand that has spent years building a substantial reputation in the Chinese market enters a new market in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, only to discover that an entity with no prior business relationship to it has already preemptively registered the trademark locally. The local jurisdiction follows a first-to-file principle, and the brand owner has little to offer beyond its Chinese registration certificate — almost no local evidence to work with.

This is a common, and genuinely difficult, situation in cross-border brand protection — can the genuine reputation a brand has built in the Chinese market serve as an effective tool in overseas enforcement? In the past, the answer largely depended on whether, and to what extent, a given country's law recognized foreign evidence, leaving companies without a consistent, reliable point of leverage. This installment examines whether a new mechanism under the revised Law genuinely changes that picture.

  Legal Update 

The new Law's Article 69 introduces something that previously had no clear institutional framework: where, in the course of an examination, hearing, or handling of a trademark case in connection with a trademark registration outside China, it is necessary to prove that a trademark is well known to the relevant public within China, the trademark administration department under the State Council may, upon the request of a party, make a determination as to whether the trademark is well known in accordance with Article 63 of the Law.

This provision needs to be read together with Article 63, which we discussed in Part 3 of this series. Article 63 sets out the well-known trademark determination system itself — both the administrative and judicial recognition pathways, and the five factors a determination must weigh. What Article 69 does is extend this mechanism, originally designed to serve domestic trademark disputes, explicitly to a new scenario: overseas trademark cases that require proof of well-known status within China. This means companies have, for the first time, a relatively clear official channel for obtaining an authoritative determination of their trademark's reputation in the Chinese market — one that can be used in overseas litigation or administrative proceedings.

Article 69(2) further provides that where a person, by fraud or other improper means, handles an application for trademark registration outside China or other trademark matters on behalf of a client within China, thereby harming the client's interests, State interests, the public interest, or the lawful rights and interests of others, the matter shall be handled and penalized in accordance with Article 67 of the Law — this extends the agency accountability framework we discussed in Part 8 of this series to cross-border agency services. Companies entrusting overseas trademark matters should likewise pay attention to the compliance of the agency service itself, though this is not the focus of this installment and we will not dwell on it here.

  Practical Analysis 

Accurately understanding the practical value of Article 69 requires returning to a limitation we emphasized in Part 3 of this series: judicial recognition of well-known trademark status — whether in a domestic case or this newly added overseas scenario — continues to follow the principles of determination on an as-needed basis, case-specific effect, and passive recognition. This means Article 69 does not offer a one-time, reusable “well-known trademark certificate” — it provides a case-by-case confirmation procedure, initiated upon a party's request, tied to the needs of a specific overseas case. Companies should not read this provision as meaning they can apply for a well-known determination in advance and keep it on hand — rather, it means that once a specific overseas case genuinely arises requiring proof of reputation within China, and the relevant legal requirements are met, there is now an additional official channel available.

The practical significance of this distinction lies in a shift in evidentiary strategy. In the past, a company seeking to prove its trademark's reputation in China within overseas litigation would typically compile its own set of Chinese market use evidence, media coverage, and sales data, and submit it to the overseas examination authority or court — but the probative weight of that material depended heavily on how well the overseas adjudicator understood the Chinese market and how much trust it placed in the materials, an outcome difficult for the company to predict in advance. The official confirmation Article 69 provides essentially shifts part of this process from “the company organizing its own materials to persuade an overseas adjudicator” to “a Chinese authority first making an authoritative determination, which the company then submits abroad as evidence in its own right.” From an overseas adjudicator's perspective, a confirmation issued by a Chinese official authority will typically carry greater authority and credibility than materials a company has compiled on its own. It is worth noting, however, that Article 69 does not itself guarantee an overseas authority will accept this confirmation — its value lies in strengthening the authority and persuasiveness of the evidence, not in substituting for an overseas jurisdiction's own independent determination of well-known status, bad-faith registration, or prior rights. The ultimate evidentiary weight it carries still depends on the evidentiary rules and examination standards of the specific overseas jurisdiction involved.

Whether this value can actually be realized also still depends on whether the company can produce evidence sufficient to support the domestic well-known determination in the first place — none of the five factors set out in Article 63 can be skipped.

  Practical Impact 

Once the boundaries of Article 69 are understood, what a company genuinely needs to focus on is not just evidence retention itself — a logic we discussed at length in Part 4 of this series — but a new perspective: Article 69 gives companies, for the first time, a formal channel through which brand evidence accumulated in the Chinese market can be officially confirmed and converted into material usable for overseas enforcement.

In the past, the sales data, advertising records, media coverage, consumer recognition surveys, and various accolades and protective records a company built up in the Chinese market mainly served domestic trademark confirmation and enforcement needs, with their value largely confined to domestic proceedings. With Article 69 in place, this evidence — previously useful only in the domestic context — now has the opportunity to pass through a confirmation procedure with the trademark administration department under the State Council and be converted into proof usable in overseas proceedings, carrying official authority. This is a substantive evidentiary conversion, not simply transplanting domestic evidence overseas unchanged.

Consider an example: a consumer brand has operated in the Chinese market for many years and built up considerable reputation, but had never systematically considered the overseas enforcement value of that reputation. When this company enters an emerging market and discovers a local preemptive registration problem, if it has properly retained its Chinese market use evidence as a matter of routine practice, that material already provides the foundation for applying for a well-known determination under Article 69 — the company can apply to the trademark administration department under the State Council for confirmation, and then submit that converted official confirmation as more substantial evidence to the overseas examination authority or court. By contrast, if the company has not managed this kind of evidence systematically, even if its brand is genuinely well known in China as a matter of fact, it will struggle to produce material capable of withstanding scrutiny within a short window after a preemptive registration problem surfaces — let alone complete the subsequent evidentiary conversion.

This means that for companies with overseas expansion plans, the work of retaining domestic brand evidence should not serve domestic trademark enforcement needs alone — it should also be incorporated into the company's broader overseas risk management framework. Domestic evidence is no longer just material for domestic cases — it is a brand asset with genuine potential for cross-border conversion.

  GreRoyalt Observation 

In assisting companies with cross-border brand disputes, we have observed that a kind of timing mismatch has long persisted in companies' overseas trademark filing and enforcement preparation: building a brand and accumulating evidence domestically tends to be an ongoing, routine part of running the business, while the risk of overseas preemptive registration, and the need to enforce against it, tends to arise only passively, once the company enters a new market or actually runs into a dispute. The result of this mismatch is that, at the very moment a company genuinely needs to demonstrate its reputation to an overseas authority, it often discovers, for the first time, that its domestic evidentiary foundation is not nearly as solid as it had assumed.

The real significance of Article 69 may lie not in how much overseas protection it provides on its own, but in the fact that it explicitly puts companies on notice, for the first time: domestic brand assets may carry cross-border enforcement value from the very first day they begin accumulating, not only once a company has expanded abroad and run into a preemptive registration problem. Domestic evidence management and overseas risk management are shifting from two unrelated parallel tracks into two connected links on the same brand-asset management chain — the more a company treats its domestic trademark use evidence as an asset requiring ongoing, systematic management, the more resources it will have available to draw on and convert when it encounters preemptive registration overseas.

  Points to Consider 

?  Has the company retained the evidence of its brand reputation in the Chinese market in a sufficiently systematic way to support a future well-known trademark determination application and the subsequent conversion of that evidence for overseas use?

?  For overseas markets the company has already entered, or plans to enter, has it assessed whether — and to what extent — the relevant authorities recognize well-known trademark confirmations or other official certifications issued by Chinese authorities?

?  Are overseas trademark matters being handled by a professional team capable of understanding both the Chinese evidentiary framework and the requirements of local law, to ensure domestic evidence can be effectively converted into material genuinely usable in overseas proceedings?

  Series Conclusion 

With this installment, the ten-part series Brand Protection Insights: 2026 Trademark Law Amendment is complete. This revision has not resolved every issue in the trademark field at a stroke, but it has substantively changed how companies should understand and manage their trademark assets: registration, use, evidence, procedure, damages, and cross-border protection are no longer isolated steps, but are converging into a single, integrated brand-asset management system — whether a trademark can be registered now depends on whether a genuine business rationale stands behind it; whether it can be maintained depends on whether the use evidence can withstand scrutiny; whether an enforcement case can secure substantial damages depends on whether case selection and evidence fixing were already in place before litigation began; and the reputation a brand has built in China can now, through official confirmation, be converted into a tool for enforcement abroad. The thread running through all ten installments has been this: trademark protection is moving from straightforward registration administration toward something more systematic and ongoing — brand governance.

This trademark law revision is only the first season of this series. We will continue this practice-oriented framework across related areas — including unfair competition, trade secret protection, and e-commerce platform governance — to discuss the ongoing institutional evolution and strategic implications of brand protection in the Chinese market.

This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice for any specific matter. Please consult qualified counsel regarding your particular circumstances.