If CNIPA refuses your application

A refusal is an examination decision, not a rejection of you

For how CNIPA notices work in general, including the filing receipt and correction requests, see CNIPA official notices. This page is only about refusals.

When CNIPA examines your mark, it checks the application for formal problems and then for registrability: whether the mark is distinctive enough, and whether it conflicts with earlier marks already on file. If the examiner finds a problem, the result is a refusal. The notice states the legal grounds and identifies what it is refusing.

A refusal does not mean you did anything wrong in your filing. The common reasons are about the mark itself or about earlier rights, not about a mistake in your paperwork. The notice tells you what CNIPA objected to, which is the starting point for any response.

Partial refusal and total refusal mean different things

The notice will be one of two kinds, and the difference changes your options.

Partial refusal

CNIPA approves some of your goods or services and refuses others, usually within a single class. The approved items can move forward toward publication and registration. To keep the approved items on their own track while you challenge the refused items, applicants commonly split the application into a divisional filing. That is a separate procedure with its own rules and its own short deadline, also counted from when you receive the notice, so confirm the exact dates before relying on them.

Total refusal

CNIPA refuses the whole application. Nothing proceeds unless you ask CNIPA to review the refusal and that review succeeds.

Read the notice carefully to see which items were refused and which were approved. Ginbing posts the original notice and an English translation to your order so you can see exactly what CNIPA decided.

The review deadline is short and fixed

If you want to contest a refusal, you ask CNIPA to review it. This is the review of rejection, decided by the trademark review function within CNIPA, the work that formerly sat with the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board before it was absorbed into CNIPA during the 2018 reorganization of China’s trademark authorities.

The deadline to request that review is short. Under Article 34 of the Trademark Law, the general rule is 15 days from when you receive the refusal. Miss it and the refusal usually stands, so the date you receive the notice is the date that matters.

Ginbing flags the deadline when it posts a refusal to your order so you are not relying on yourself to spot it in a Chinese-language document.

The official source for the 15-day review period is Article 34 of the 2019 Trademark Law.

Deciding whether to respond

A review is not automatic. CNIPA decides based on the refusal grounds, the earlier marks cited, and the arguments and evidence put forward. A review that succeeds returns the application to the examination track toward publication; a review that fails can sometimes be taken further to the Beijing Intellectual Property Court. Some refusals are contested; some are better answered by adjusting your mark or your goods and services and filing again.

A refusal review is a new procedural decision based on the grounds and evidence in the notice. Check the current Terms for the filing package boundary, and decide how to respond before the notice deadline.