On 22 September the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) held a themed press conference in Jinan, Shandong, on how intellectual property is supporting high-quality development in the Yellow River basin. Spokesperson Heng Fuguang said that by August 2026 the nine provinces and regions along the river held more than 910,000 valid invention patents and 10,074,000 valid trademark registrations, with average annual growth over the last Five-Year Plan period 1.8 and 2.1 percentage points above the national average; the region has 1,758 geographical indication products and 2,375 collective and certification marks registered as geographical indications, each one third of the national total. The conference also presented the provinces' differing approaches: figures published earlier by Shandong show that, through its patent pre-examination reform and fast-track green channel, more than 41,000 invention patents have been granted via the fast track with an examination period 84 per cent shorter than the ordinary route; Shandong, one of the first data-IP pilot provinces, has registered data exceeding one hundred billion records, Shaanxi leads a five-province north-western mechanism for data-IP registration and joint enforcement, and Shanxi has also been approved for a data-IP pilot.
The briefing was a stock-take of existing work rather than the launch of a new regime, and is best read as a policy and industry observation: first, IP growth in the region is tilting towards basin-wide coordination and commercialisation, with patent pools, industrialisation projects and the protection centres' fast-track channels as the common tools; second, data-IP registration is moving from pilots to regional cooperation, and registration certificates are already being used in pledge financing, but their legal nature still rests on provincial pilot rules with no unified national legislation. J&C recommends that companies with manufacturing or R&D bases in the Yellow River provinces build the local protection centres' fast-track pre-examination into the filing schedule for core technologies, after first confirming that their industry falls within the centre's pre-examination scope; companies holding large business datasets should watch their province's data-IP registration platform and use a registration certificate as supporting evidence in data transactions and financing, without treating it as a statutory exclusive right.
