In the past two weeks, the Chinese government granted US President Donald Trump 38 valuable trademarks. They come as tensions between China and the United States have cooled somewhat, leading to suggestions that the award is a poorly concealed quid pro quo designed to reward a president with considerable personal business interests. On Tuesday, Senator Ben Cardin went so far as to accuse China of “trying to curry favour with the president of the United States.”
That sounds plausible. But Chinese officials have other reasons for ensuring Trump’s trademarks are protected.
In most countries, obtaining a trademark isn’t front-page news, even for a president. But China is unique in that it employs a “first to file” system requiring no evidence of ownership or prior use. For example, Xintong Tiandi Technology Ltd, a leather-goods firm, legally markets iPhone wallets in China because it registered “iPhone” for use on leather products in 2007.
Such “trademark squatting” contributes to an atmosphere of general chaos when it comes to intellectual property in China. If a nobody can own a valuable foreign trademark, then effectively no one owns it, and oversight will be lax.
Last year, 258 trademark applications were filed using various permutations of “Ivanka Trump,” and knockoff Ivanka stuff is everywhere. Enforcement is close to non-existent.
But there are important exceptions. In 2004, a Beijing entrepreneur attempted to trademark President George W. Bush’s name (bu shi, in Chinese) in connection with a line of disposable diapers. At the time, People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, reported that it was unlikely to be approved because “it may bring about bad social impact if a leader’s name is registered as a trademark”.