More Than a Report: What the SPC’s 2025 IP Release Is Really Saying

03 Jun 2026

by Fredrick Xie

What made this year’s Supreme People’s Court IP release interesting was not the report itself. It was the bundle.

On 20 April 2026, the Court did not just issue its annual report on judicial protection of intellectual property. It released, at the same time, the 2025 judicial protection report, the Implementation Plan for 2026–2030, the new judicial interpretation on punitive damages in IP civil cases, and the 2025 typical IP cases.

Around the same release cycle, it also published the Annual Report on Legal Application Issues in IP Cases, distilling 45 legal-application issues from cases concluded in 2025.

Taken together, these materials do more than summarize a year’s work. They send a coordinated message: here is the data, here is the direction, here is the remedy, and here is how the rules should be understood.

The headline figure is easy enough to repeat: in 2025, Chinese courts newly accepted 552,600 IP cases and concluded 539,649. But that number, on its own, is not really the point.

The more useful question is what the Court chose to emphasize alongside it. This year, the focus was clearly on technology-related disputes, data, unfair competition, anti-monopoly, criminal trademark enforcement, and foreign-related litigation.

That choice matters. It suggests that the Court is no longer using the annual release simply to show the scale of the docket. It is increasingly using it to signal which parts of that docket matter most.

Chart 1. What the SPC Chose to Highlight in 2025

Highlighted category	Figure	Note
Concluded first-instance civil technology-related IP cases	64,000
Concluded disputes involving data ownership and transactions	908	+25.6% YoY
Concluded first-instance trademark civil infringement cases	115,300
Concluded first-instance trademark criminal cases	8,033
Concluded first-instance copyright civil cases	256,400
Concluded first-instance unfair competition civil cases	10,135
Cases in which monopolistic conduct was found	27
Newly accepted first-instance foreign-related IP cases	11,066	+34.1% YoY

That shift becomes clearer once the last few years are placed side by side. China’s IP docket remains enormous, but the more interesting development is structural. The overall volume has fluctuated rather than moving in a straight line, while the composition of the docket has been moving in a more definite direction.

Chart 2. China IP Cases Accepted by Courts (2021–2025).

The story is not steady year-on-year growth, but a consistently high-volume system with fluctuation.

One technical point should be noted: the 2021–2024 reports mainly present newly accepted case figures by category, whereas the 2025 release foregrounds a set of selected concluded-category figures. Not every figure is therefore directly comparable across all five years.

The point, in other words, is not that China’s IP courts “keep getting busier” every single year. The point is that the system remains very large, while the Court has become more selective in the story it tells about that system.

That becomes even more obvious once one looks inside the case mix. If one wants to understand where Chinese IP adjudication is actually moving, the better indicators are no longer the totals alone.

The more revealing categories are patents, technology contracts, competition disputes, data, and trade-secret style cases.

Chart 3. First-Instance Civil IP Case Mix (2021–2024).

Copyright and trademark still dominate by volume, but the real movement has been toward patent, technology contract, and competition litigation.

That structural shift is exactly why the Implementation Plan (2026–2030) deserves to be read together with the annual report. The report tells us what the Court handled. The plan tells us what the Court wants to push: integrated circuits, industrial mother machines, high-end instruments, basic software, advanced materials, bio-manufacturing, aerospace, new energy, data rights, artificial intelligence, anti-monopoly, unfair competition, trade secrets, and foreign-related disputes.

The plan also leans into procedure and enforcement tools: conduct preservation, evidence preservation, prior judgments, better coordination between civil, administrative and criminal mechanisms, closer linkage between judicial and administrative protection, and eventually a more specialized litigation framework. It reads like a roadmap for a more technical, more policy-aware, and more assertive IP judiciary.

The same is true of remedies. Punitive damages have been growing in importance for several years, but this year the Court chose to underline that trend by issuing a separate judicial interpretation on punitive damages at the same time as the annual report. It shows that punitive damages are no longer being treated as a decorative feature reserved for a few headline cases. They are being folded into the mainstream architecture of serious IP enforcement.

Then there is the Annual Report on Legal Application Issues in IP Cases. This document serves a different function from the annual judicial-protection report.

The annual report is about scale and emphasis. The legal-application report is about doctrine. By extracting 45 issues from cases concluded in 2025, the Court is doing something more ambitious than publishing numbers and handing out a few typical cases. It is trying to identify recurring legal questions and push the system toward a more stable and predictable approach.

For practitioners, that matters. It suggests a court that is becoming more explicit about the rules it wants lower courts to apply, and less content to rely only on a small set of representative cases.

That, in my view, is the real takeaway from this year’s release. The Court is no longer simply saying: look how many IP cases we handled. It is saying: look at which cases matter, which industries matter, which conduct deserves pressure, and which remedies and rules will now be pushed harder. The annual release is starting to look less like a backward-looking report card and more like a forward-looking judicial policy statement.

For IP lawyers, that has obvious consequences. These materials are not just useful for client alerts or year-end summaries. They are also a map of what the Court currently cares about. Cases involving high-value technology, data disputes, trade secrets, anti-monopoly, unfair competition, foreign-related litigation, and serious bad-faith conduct are less and less likely to be treated as ordinary private disputes.

More and more often, they will be heard against a broader background of industrial policy, market-order concerns, and remedial escalation.

That means case framing matters more than before. A dispute is no longer only about whether infringement occurred. More and more often, it is also about whether the case can be presented as involving strategic innovation, digital governance, market-order distortion, or deliberate and serious misconduct deserving stronger remedies.

So yes, 552,600 is a real number, and it is worth noting. But it is not the point.

The point is that the Court released, all at once, a set of documents that turned raw case volume into something much more useful: numbers, priorities, remedies, and rules. That is why this year’s publication feels different. It is not merely an annual report. It is a fairly clear statement about where Chinese IP adjudication is heading next.

Source note

Prepared based on the Supreme People’s Court’s 2025 judicial protection report and accompanying materials released on 20 April 2026, read together with the Court’s annual reports for 2021–2024.