China’s Trademark Law draft tightens the screws on bad-faith hoarding
China has opened public consultation on the second-review draft of its revised Trademark Law, and the policy message is not subtle: the lawmakers are still moving against abnormal filings, bad-faith registrations and trademark stockpiling detached from genuine business needs. For brand owners, the shift is bigger than a tougher slogan. The distance between filing strategy and real commercial use is getting harder to defend.
That matters because the practical issue has never been limited to a handful of headline-grabbing squatting cases. The deeper problem is the accumulation of marks filed in volume, spread across classes and parked for leverage, resale or future bargaining. If the second-review draft continues to compress that space, companies will have to revisit not only what they file, but also why they file it now, how broadly they file, and what evidence can support that decision later.
Why the draft keeps targeting stockpiling
High-profile squatting disputes are easy to recognise, but they are not the core structural problem. What distorts the system more seriously is the long tail of filings that are not made for genuine use, yet still occupy the register, raise clearance costs and complicate ordinary branding decisions. A draft that keeps pressing on hoarding is effectively saying that registration should no longer function as a low-cost warehousing tool for marks with no credible business pathway behind them.
That is also why the issue should not be reduced to “bad actors” in the abstract. Stockpiling often appears in more ordinary forms: class-heavy portfolios, defensive overreach, filings split across related entities, and applications designed to reserve optionality rather than support a concrete launch plan. Once lawmakers focus on purpose and business necessity, the pressure moves upstream, closer to the filing decision itself.
Trademark portfolios will face a harder internal audit
Many companies have built portfolios in layers. One layer covers marks already in use or scheduled for near-term launch. Another sits in reserve: names filed for future expansion, defensive positioning, investor optics or simply to keep others out. The draft’s direction suggests that the second layer may become harder to justify if the portfolio starts to look detached from actual operations.
The effect will not be the same for every applicant. Large groups may be carrying years of dormant filings and legacy reserves. Start-ups, by contrast, are more likely to file too broadly because the business story is still fluid and every future option feels worth preserving. In both cases, the old instinct to “file first and sort it out later” looks less comfortable. The better question now is whether the business can explain the filing scope, the filing timing and the intended use with reasonable consistency.
Scrutiny is moving forward, and evidence will matter more
A tighter legal framework does not mean every broad filing will immediately be labelled malicious. It does mean that examiners and later dispute bodies are likely to pay closer attention to filing patterns, portfolio shape, business coherence and use-related context. Gaps that were once treated as manageable drafting flexibility may start to look more like weaknesses that need explaining.
That changes the practical role of trademark management. It is no longer just an administrative exercise of filing, renewing and recording assignments. It becomes an evidence discipline. Which marks are tied to live product plans, which are still exploratory, which classes reflect real rollout logic, and which applications should be narrowed or abandoned — these judgments need a cleaner internal record. Not every note belongs in a public filing, but when opposition, invalidation or non-use pressure arrives, the ability to explain decisions becomes part of the strategy itself.
What brand owners should adjust now
The first adjustment is to stop treating core brands, near-term sub-brands and purely defensive names as if they belong to the same filing logic. They do not. Core marks may still justify measured forward-looking coverage. Marginal or speculative names deserve tighter class selection and a lower tolerance for bulk filing. Filing discipline is becoming more valuable than filing volume.
The second adjustment is procedural. Product approval, market testing, packaging development, domain activation, channel discussions and launch planning all generate facts that can later support or weaken a filing narrative. Brand teams, legal teams and outside counsel should use that material more deliberately. The revised Trademark Law is not signalling the end of registration strategy. It is signalling the end of easy comfort with oversized portfolios that cannot be explained in business terms.
