On September 1, Zhang Mao, the Party Secretary of the Party Members of SAIC and the Minister of SAIC, attended China Trademark Association’s 20th anniversary and China Brand Economy Summit Forum, where he also delivered a topic speech. He noted to carry on the market-oriented reform direction, to attach great importance on brands for their active roles in promoting competition, encouraging innovation and boosting development, and to create with efforts a favorable market environment for the development of brand economy.
The forum was co-organized by China Trademark Association and Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. Zhu Shanlu, the Party Secretary of Peking University and the director for administrative affairs of Peking University, Liu Fan, the chairman of China Trademark Association, respectively made opening speeches in the forum. Professor Li Yining, one famous economist, made a speech with the topic of Developing Brand Economy and Promoting Industrial Upgrading. Francis Gurry, Director General of WIPO, made a video speech there.
Zhang Mao pointed to equally treat the shortage, and to comprehensively arouse the understandings on the significance of brands in promoting Economy. After many years’ constant work, China has basically founded a modern trademark legal system in accordance with the international rules and with Chinese features. Quantitatively, there were accumulatively 14.257 million trademark applications, 9.075 million registrations, in which 7.611 registrations were still in force by the end of first half of 2014. Those numbers ranked number one in the world for 12 years, and claimed that China was worth of the name of “big country in trademark”. However, as to trademark quantity per ten thousand enterprises, the figure was quite low, which was 1074 in 2011, at the same time, 2167 for Korea and 3024 for US. Compared with developed countries, the brand competitiveness was quite week, which needed urgently to improve the understandings on the significance of brands in promoting development, and to strengthen the awareness in cultivating the competitiveness.
Zhang Mao noted to strengthen brand building and to assist the implementation of innovation driven development strategy. Brand building might increase consumers’ requirement on innovated products, help them to establish the reliance with enterprises’ products, and extend the trust to enterprises, which could effectively encourage the innovation. In brand building, it needed to encourage enterprises’ innovation, fully respect market economic rules especially the competition rule, and correctly treat relations between the government and enterprises, the government and market. The subject of brands should be enterprises. The survival of brands should be determined by market rules, for which the government should reduce administrative intervention and avoid choice-makings taking the place of market and consumers.
Zhang Mao expressed to encourage brand competition and to create a safe consuming environment. Enterprises should be encouraged to voluntarily protect consumers’ legitimate interests through brand competition. Consumers should be enhanced their brand awareness and cultivated consuming habits indicated by brands. Market should be strengthened the supervision for a full, fair and orderly brand competition environment. The new amended Trademark Law should be seriously implemented, to comprehensively enhance the protections on IP rights, to strengthen law enforcement in anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition, and to safeguard a fair and honest competition order.
Professor Li Shunde, from Law Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Science, and other experts have also made speeches there. All participants have also made a full communication on commonly concerned brand-related issues. About 300 participants including relevant leaders from the Supreme Court, Ministry of Public Security, the Customs, SAIC, Legal Affairs Office of the State Council, SIPO, the Copyright Office, delegates from WIPO China Office, Korea Embassy in China, Italy Chamber of Commerce in China, and other participants from local AICs, CTA, enterprises, Trademark Agencies, and medias joined the forum.
