Specialized IP courts. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Haikou each have a dedicated IP court, which hears specified IP cases at first instance within its territory.
IP tribunals. A number of Intermediate People's Courts operate IP tribunals with cross-regional jurisdiction over technical cases at first instance — 33 of them as of June 2026.
The IP Court of the Supreme People's Court, established on January 1, 2019, has centralized jurisdiction over second-instance technical civil and administrative cases: invention patents, utility models, plant varieties, integrated circuit layout designs, technical secrets, computer software and antitrust. Centralizing these appeals has made the standards applied in technical cases considerably more consistent, which also means appellate strategy has to be built around how the Supreme People's Court decides, not only around the first-instance ruling.
Non-technical cases — trademark and copyright disputes, for example — generally begin in the primary or intermediate people's courts, with appeal to the court at the next level. Foreign-related cases raise further questions: whether a jurisdiction clause is effective, and how service, notarization and legalization are handled for parties outside China.
