CHANG TSI
News
National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Commerce issued the 2019 edition of Negative List for Market Entry of Foreign Investment ("Negative List") and Catalogue of Guidance on Encouraged Foreign-investment Industry ("Catalogue") on June 30th, 2019. The Negative List and Catalogue will come into effect on July 30th, 2019.
Nationwide, Negative List for Market Entry of Foreign Investment is cut down to 40 items from 48 items. Particularly for Pilot Free Trade Zones, while 6 new Pilot Free Trade Zones are incoming, Negative List is cut down to 37 items from 45 items. Restrictions of foreign investment in areas including urban fuel/heating service, cinema, talent agency, value-added telecommunication, publication, oil and gas exploration, nonferrous metals mining are to be loosened or eliminated.
In addition, 1108 items are included into the Catalogue to encourage foreign investment in those industries such as 5G core-components, industrial android and AI with preferential treatments regarding tax and land.
According to the spokesman of National Development and Reform Commission, Negative List will only be subtracted, not added, and by the end of this year, all restrictions on foreign investment except for Negative List will be removed to ensure consistent standards for domestic and foreign investment in market entry.
Recently, the Jianfa v. Michael Kors case, named “Deal of the year” and “The Top Ten Intellectual Property Case with Research Value”, was finally concluded. Managing Partner Simon Tsi, and Partner Michael Fu from Chang Tsi & Partners represented Michael Kors (hereafter referred as “Defendant”) to win the second instance trademark infringement case, wherein all the claims by Shantou Chenghai Jianfa Handbag Craft Factory (hereafter referred as “Plaintiff”) were rejected.
In order to further reduce the burden of IP right owner and stimulate economic development, recently, Ministry of Finance of China and National Development and Reform Commission published the Announcement of Patent and Trademark Application Fee Reduction for 2019.
There is a continuously rising number of IP litigation cases in China in the past five years. For example, the number of civil, administrative and criminal IP cases newly filed before the courts in 2018 reached 334,951, according to the Annual Report on the Judicial Protection of Intellectual Property Rights of Chinese Courts (2018), which is an increase of 97,709 (41.19%) over 2017.
