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CNIPA China (CN) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction CN (WIPO ST.3: CN)
Issuing body China National Intellectual Property Administration (国家知识产权局)
Rights administered patent, utility_model, trademark, design (plus geographical indications and integrated-circuit layout designs, administered by CNIPA but out of scope for this synopsis)
Working languages Mandarin Chinese (primary; operational); English (information site only)
Connector status skipped (route via higher layers; no native CNIPA connector planned)
Last verified 2026-05-16
Manifest entry not listed in coverage/sources.yaml — covered transitively via WO/EPO (INPADOC CN feed)

Detail surveys:

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • EPO OPS / INPADOC (via regional/epo.md) — CN patent biblio + abstracts + family + legal events (since 2024-12, ST.27-formatted). The single most important transitive channel.
  • WIPO Patentscope — CN national patent collection (~3M docs; full text in CN from 1996+; English bibliographic data 1985+; full-text translation via WIPO Translate).
  • WIPO Hague Express — CN designs filed via Hague (post 2022-05-05 only; CN joined Hague 2022-05-05).
  • WIPO Madrid Monitor / Global Brand Database — TMs designating CN via Madrid (a subset of CN TMs; pure CN national filings not covered).
  • WIPO Lex — Patent Law, Trademark Law, AUCL, Copyright Law statutes for CN.

Rating: 🔴 Red — No API

Every endpoint WAF-blocked from US egress; 2025 TM platform requires CN mainland mobile + real-name verification — foreigners structurally excluded Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

CNIPA is the world's #1 patent office by application volume — 1.8M patent applications filed in 2024 (per WIPO IPI 2025), plus 6.4M trademark applications the same year. It is one of the IP5 offices (USPTO, EPO, JPO, KIPO, CNIPA) and the dominant filer in 8 of 10 frontier technology fields tracked by WIPO. Coverage of Chinese patents, utility models, trademarks, and designs is strategically essential for any global prior-art, ownership, or freedom-to-operate workflow.

For agents working on Chinese IP, the operational gap between "strategic importance" and "programmatic accessibility" is the largest of any major office. CNIPA's own systems are effectively closed to foreign programmatic users. Practical access flows through three higher-layer proxies (EPO OPS, WIPO Patentscope, WIPO Hague) for as much of the data as those proxies cover.

§2 What's unique here

  • CN-language full text (description + claims) of utility models and pre-1996 inventions — EPO OPS and Patentscope are thinner here than for inventions from 1996+.
  • CN-specific procedural events — PRCD reexamination/invalidation decisions, register changes, fee payments. Dec 2024 ST.27 upgrade aligns legal-status emissions to a WIPO standard (flows to INPADOC), but the most granular events remain CNIPA-only.
  • Utility models — CN is the world's #1 UM jurisdiction; many CN UMs never appear in EPO INPADOC's UM subset.
  • CN-only trademarks — the vast majority of CN TM filings are national-only and live only in SBJ; Madrid covers a thin slice.
  • Pre-2022 CN-only design patents — CN joined Hague 2022-05-05; pre-2022 designs are CNIPA-only.

§3 Programmatic surfaces

Every CNIPA-operated surface is 🔴 RED against the zero-infra- proxy constraint. There is no documented public REST/JSON/XML API for any of patents, utility models, trademarks, or designs. Live probes from US egress on 2026-05-16: 412 on pss-system, cpquery, ggfw, sso; 406 on wcjs; 403 on the developer- FAQ page itself.

Surface Right(s) Endpoint Auth Format Verdict
Patent Search & Analysis (PSS) patent, UM, design pss-system.cponline.cnipa.gov.cn Email account + slider CAPTCHA + OTP HTML SPA 🔴
China & multi-country exam info (cpquery) patent legal status cpquery.cponline.cnipa.gov.cn Email account + CAPTCHA HTML SPA 🔴
Patent business processing (cponline) filing + prosecution cponline.cnipa.gov.cn Login wall HTML SPA 🔴
Trademark online search (WCJS) trademark wcjs.sbj.cnipa.gov.cn Anon. search + slider CAPTCHA; account requires CN mainland phone + real-name verification (late 2025) HTML SPA 🔴
Trademark services portal (SBJ) trademark sbj.cnipa.gov.cn Same as WCJS HTML SPA 🔴
IP Data Resources Public Service (ipdps) bulk catalog ipdps.cnipa.gov.cn Institutional contract (Chinese entity); 45 orgs served per WIPO CWS/ATR/PI/2024/CN Bulk XML 🔴
National IP Public Service Platform (ggfw) unified gateway ggfw.cnipa.gov.cn SSO; same CN-phone constraints HTML SPA 🔴
Patent publication PDFs (epub) published patents http://epub.cnipa.gov.cn/ Login PDF 🔴
Office-to-office PCT M2M API patent Bilateral with WIPO (CNIPA WIPO API Day 2023) Inter-office contract XML 🔴 (not a public developer surface)

Material details for the most consequential of these:

  • PSS / cpquery / sbj / ggfw — JS SPAs behind WAFs that return 412 Precondition Failed / 406 Not Acceptable to unattested clients (probe 2026-05-16). Internal AJAX endpoints exist but are undocumented and not contractually stable.
  • wcjs.sbj.cnipa.gov.cn — late-2025 account-registration tightening (Chinese mainland phone + real-name verification) forecloses account-based foreign machine access. Per Yucheng IP Law 2025; CNIPA's own English procedure page confirms foreign applicants must engage a recorded Chinese trademark agency (art_2996_205374).
  • ipdps.cnipa.gov.cn — consolidated bulk-data portal (Oct 2023 launch; 60 data types as of 2024 per WIPO CWS/ATR/PI/2024/CN). Distribution to "45 research institutions, IP service agencies, and enterprises on a targeted basis" — a closed list, not a public API.
  • December 2024 ST.27 legal-status upgrade. CNIPA emits WIPO ST.27-compliant legal-status events as of Dec 2024 — surfaced through the cpquery UI, not as an API. This should improve what INPADOC ingests; see §5.
  • 2026-01-01 XML-only filing mandate. Patent applications must be filed in WIPO ST.96-style XML from Jan 1 2026 — applicant- facing, not searcher-facing, but indicates the internal data is already ST.96-shaped.

§4 Fees

CNIPA publishes patent fee schedules in CNY covering filing (invention / utility model / design), additional priority claims, publication printing, substantive examination (invention only), annuities (banded across years 1–20 plus PTA-period annuities), reexamination, evaluation reports (UM/design), and invalidation petitions. Trade mark and IC layout-design schedules sit on the same English landing.

Discount programs:

  • Fee reductions for individuals and SMEs on annuities (eligibility under State Council policy).
  • Open-license patent annuity reduction (introduced under the 2020 Patent Law amendment).

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

  • CN patent biblio + abstracts + family + legal events — transitively via patent_client_agents.epo_ops. The December 2024 ST.27 upgrade on CNIPA's side improves the fidelity of what flows to INPADOC.
  • CN patent statutes (Patent Law, Implementing Regs) — via WIPO Lex; statutes corpus is the standard pattern (mirror once, expose by article).
  • PCT applications with CN as receiving office or designated state — via WIPO Patentscope (Patentscope is not yet wrapped as a first-class connector; pending).

What we should add (if anything)

Nothing in the form of a direct CNIPA connector. The verdict is 🔴 RED — no public API, hostile WAFs, mainland-phone real-name verification on the trademark service since late 2025, bulk products gated to Chinese registered entities.

If we want richer CN coverage beyond what EPO OPS gives: - Patentscope wrap (general — applies to CN and many other collections at once) — would unlock CN full-text descriptions and claims back to 1996 with English MT. Cross-reference BACKLOG.md. This is not a CNIPA connector; it's a WIPO-layer connector that improves CN coverage. - WIPO Hague Express wrap for post-2022 CN designs — small, trivial.

Next steps

  1. Track upstream changes: re-verify the "real-name mainland-phone" constraint on the TM service in 6 months; if CNIPA opens a foreign-developer programme, re-evaluate.
  2. Improve CN coverage transitively by scoping a Patentscope connector (separate workstream — Patentscope improves CN, JP, KR, AR, and PCT coverage simultaneously).
  3. Confirm via a live INPADOC call that the December 2024 ST.27 legal-status events actually appear in the EPO OPS CN feed today (not just announced by CNIPA).

§6 Known unknowns

  • Does WIPO Patentscope's CN feed give full-text claims and descriptions where EPO OPS lacks them? Probe against a known utility model and a pre-2010 invention before architecting.
  • How current is the ST.27 CN legal-status feed as it surfaces in EPO INPADOC? CNIPA announced Dec 2024; EPO ingestion lag is a separate question.
  • For CN utility models — what fraction live in INPADOC vs. CNIPA-only? Quantify the unique-here gap via coverage probe.
  • For CN designs pre-2022 — any acceptable third-party mirror, or simply document the gap?
  • Is the WIPO Global Brand Database mirroring any CN national TMs beyond Madrid designations? Assume no full national coverage until verified.
  • Watch for post-2025 changes to the foreign-applicant TM account- creation rules (CNIPA English news channel).

§7 References

Primary sources only:

Last updated 2026-05-16.