Business Question 

Many companies face a confusing situation: the trademark is genuinely in use, the product is genuinely selling, yet the moment the company actually needs to produce “use evidence” — whether to defend against a non-use cancellation petition or to support an infringement damages claim — the materials on hand turn out not to hold up.

Why might a court or examination authority find that a trademark hasn't been used, even though it genuinely has been? This is not a misperception on the company's part — it is a scenario that will arise with increasing frequency following this revision. This installment is not about producing a checklist of “which materials count as evidence,” but about a more fundamental shift: genuine use is moving from a peripheral formality for maintaining a trademark right into a central factor that directly determines a trademark's real value and its capacity to support enforcement. What a company needs is not evidence gathered in a hurry, but a system that produces evidence on an ongoing basis.

  Legal Update 

Two core provisions bear directly on genuine use. Article 57(2) carries forward and clarifies the non-use cancellation rule: where a registered trademark has not been used for three consecutive years without justifiable reason, any entity or individual may apply to the trademark administration department under the State Council for its cancellation. Article 78(1) provides that where the holder of the exclusive right to use a registered trademark claims infringement damages, the alleged infringer may raise a defense that the rights holder has not used the registered trademark, and the court may require the rights holder to produce evidence of actual use within the three years preceding the infringing act; if the rights holder can establish neither use nor any other loss caused by the infringement, the alleged infringer bears no liability for damages.

This is not an entirely new rule, but the new Law situates it, together with the non-use cancellation provision, within a stronger overall logic of genuine use — giving it a more prominent role in infringement damages disputes.

Read together, these two provisions send a consistent signal: whether a trademark remains on the register and whether it can actually support an enforcement claim are increasingly becoming two separate questions, each requiring its own evidentiary support. Non-use cancellation clears long-dormant trademarks from the register; Article 78 ensures that even where a trademark remains validly registered, a rights holder seeking damages must still produce evidence of genuine use, or risk having the damages claim itself come up short.

  Practical Analysis 

Read in isolation, these two provisions can easily look like a pair of disconnected technical rules. But viewed over a longer timeline, the role of genuine use within China's trademark system has been on a steady upward trajectory, and this revision marks a new point on that trajectory rather than its starting point.

For a long time, the center of gravity in trademark law sat squarely on registration — once a mark was approved, the acquisition and continuation of the right were, in large part, treated as settled, and whether the mark was actually used became a question that was concentrated into non-use cancellation, opposition or invalidation proceedings, or infringement litigation — rather than something a company tracked on an ongoing basis as part of day-to-day operations. But judicial and administrative practice has quietly been shifting that center of gravity in recent years: courts have grown increasingly specific about the use evidence they expect rights holders to submit in infringement cases, and administrative authorities have applied increasingly strict scrutiny to marks that are used “in form” but never genuinely brought to market. This revision takes a trend that had already taken shape in practice and formally writes it into the statutory text, elevating it from an examination tendency into a codified rule.

The logic behind this trend is not hard to follow: a trademark's market value has never come from the registration certificate itself, but from the goodwill and consumer recognition it accumulates in the marketplace. Allowing a registered-but-unused trademark to sit on the register indefinitely, while still supporting an infringement damages claim, effectively lets that mark cash in market value on the strength of paper rights alone — value it never actually created. The strengthened genuine-use requirement is, at its core, about re-anchoring trademark rights to the real commercial value of the mark. For companies, this means: trademark management is no longer a one-time act of registration, but an ongoing commercial activity — the legal value of a trademark is becoming ever more directly tied to whether the company continues to genuinely operate the brand.

  Practical Impact 

With this trend in mind, the most immediate question for companies becomes: what kind of evidence will actually withstand examination or litigation scrutiny?

Many companies' first instinct is to list out “which materials count as evidence” — invoices, contracts, advertisements, website screenshots. That instinct is not wrong, but the probative value of any single piece of material, taken on its own, is usually limited: an invoice that does not display the specific trademark cannot, on its own, prove use of that mark; a photograph of product packaging that cannot be tied to an actual sale is similarly hard to use, by itself, to prove the mark has reached the market. What courts and examination authorities actually focus on is never whether a company holds one particularly “strong” piece of evidence, but whether it can produce a set of materials that corroborate one another and form a complete chain.

Consider an example: a single photograph of product packaging carries limited weight on its own. But if that photograph can be linked to a corresponding sales contract, an invoice, shipping records, and the listing and backend sales data from an e-commerce platform — forming a complete chain such as “product bearing the trademark → sales contract signed → invoice issued → goods shipped → publicly sold on the platform” — no single piece of material stands alone any longer; each corroborates and reinforces the others. What this chain proves, collectively, is not merely that the mark “appeared,” but that it has been continuously and genuinely deployed in commercial activity, actually performing the function of identifying the source of goods — which is precisely the core standard for genuine use. What a company needs to build is not a checklist of evidence, but a chain-of-evidence mindset: retaining each category of material individually, while also ensuring those materials can be cross-referenced and corroborate one another.

  GreRoyalt Observation 

In handling non-use cancellation defenses and infringement damages evidence in practice, we have repeatedly observed a pattern: companies lose non-use cancellation cases and infringement actions not, typically, because the trademark genuinely went unused, but because the company never built a system capable of proving that use. The evidence may well exist, but scattered across different departments and the laptops and inboxes of different employees, disconnected from one another — so that when it is actually needed, the company cannot produce a complete, credible chain, only a handful of isolated materials vulnerable to challenge. That is the fundamental difference between “retaining evidence” and “building a system” — the former is passive document storage; the latter is an active management process.

Drawing on this experience, we propose a fixed evaluative tool we call the GreRoyalt Evidence Chain Test — for each candidate piece of evidence, a company asks three fixed questions: Is this material genuinely credible on its own? Does it reflect a connection between the trademark and the specific goods or services it is registered for? Can it be cross-referenced with other materials to form an identifiable chain of transactions or public commercial use? A set of materials that answers all three questions affirmatively carries the strongest probative value; material that can never be cross-referenced with anything else, however much of it there is, is unlikely on its own to support a finding of genuine use.

  Practice Checklist 

✓  Establish an annual evidence-archiving process for core trademarks, fully archiving key sales, marketing, and e-commerce platform evidence at least once a year, with a designated owner — legal or brand management — responsible for the archive.

✓  Run each candidate piece of use evidence through the three questions of the GreRoyalt Evidence Chain Test, treating materials that pass all three as core evidence, and supplementing with materials that can be linked to them to form a complete transactional chain.

✓  Conduct a completeness review of priority trademarks (particularly high-value marks, marks previously involved in enforcement, or marks at risk of preemptive registration) every six months, using the Evidence Chain Test to verify substance rather than merely counting how many documents exist.

✓  For peripheral-class trademarks that have lacked use records for several consecutive years, evaluate — in conjunction with the Business Justification File introduced in Part II — whether a use plan should be put in place, or whether the filing strategy itself should be adjusted.

In the next installment: “Now That the Opposition Period Has Been Shortened, How Should Companies Redesign Their Brand Enforcement Strategy?” — examining the accelerated examination and confirmation timeline, the practical impact of the opposition period's shortening from three months to two on companies' monitoring cadence, and how companies should build a trademark monitoring mechanism matched to the new examination cycle.

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.