CHANG TSI
Insights
On 1 August 2026, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) launched a new bilateral Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot — a dedicated accelerated route between the two offices that, unlike the existing IP5 multilateral framework, runs for an indefinite term and isn't tied to a periodic renewal cycle. A month in, it's a good moment to look at what this route actually offers applicants — particularly European and UK applicants who are already in, or planning to move into, the Chinese market.
If you already hold an allowable claim set from the EPO or the UK IPO, and have a corresponding application on file in China, PPH gives you a ready-made way to speed things up: put that favourable result to work and move your CNIPA examination along faster. Getting the claim correspondence right, and timing any amendments correctly, matters more than it might seem — get either wrong and you can lose the window entirely. It's part of why quite a few European and US applicants prefer to have this coordinated by counsel who work both sides of the process.
The numbers make a strong case. Since CNIPA joined the IP5 PPH Improvement Initiative in 2024, it has published data showing it receives roughly 5,000 PPH requests a year, with an overall grant rate of around 85% among closed cases — about 3% granted without a single office action, 46% after just one, and 24% after two, meaning close to three-quarters of granted cases clear in two rounds of examination or fewer. The first office action typically issues in under two months, and cases move from PPH grant to conclusion in around eight months on average — both comfortably ahead of the targets CNIPA set for itself under the initiative, and broadly consistent with what our own team sees in practice. For overseas applicants looking to get patent protection in China quickly, PPH is a well-tested route with a strong track record, and one worth building into your filing strategy.
This isn't a niche mechanism, either. Figures published by the Japan Patent Office show that in 2020 alone, CNIPA received 1,069 PPH requests based on EPO results — more than eight times the 132 requests EPO received based on CNIPA results that same year. In other words, bringing an EPO result into China to accelerate examination there is a path plenty of European applicants are already using, with outcomes that are fairly predictable.
If you're also active in the UK, there's an even more established option. The bilateral PPH arrangement between the UK IPO and CNIPA dates back to 1 July 2014 — over a decade of track record, making it the longest-running of any of CNIPA's bilateral PPH arrangements, and it operates entirely independently of the new EPO pilot. Whichever office your allowable claims come from — the EPO or the UK IPO — there's already a mature, stable route for bringing that result into China.
The value here runs both ways. Chinese applicants' own filings in Europe are growing quickly too — China climbed to third place globally in EPO filings in 2025, according to the EPO's 2025 Technology Dashboard — and this new bilateral pilot gives that side of the traffic a simpler accelerated route as well.
Patent work is becoming more bidirectional, and more global, by the day. Chang Tsi & Partners' patent team has long handled cross-jurisdictional filing and prosecution coordination, and works closely with counterparts across Europe and the US. If you're considering extending your patent strategy into China, we'd welcome the conversation — reach out to Irene Wang and her team at Chang Tsi & Partners.
