China Customs IP Recordation: How to Make It Work at the Port
A company that sold protective work gloves made in China came to us only after its own shipment had been detained. Years earlier, it had registered its trademark in China, and the registration was valid. But it covered gloves worn as clothing. Protective work gloves sit in a different class, and a competitor found the gap, registered the mark for the goods the company actually sold, and used that registration to have the shipment detained.
By the time the company became our client, it had protected its trademark on paper and had nothing at the border. Recordation works only when the underlying China rights cover the goods you ship, so the registration has to be right before recording it with Customs accomplishes anything. We tell the full story in China Trademark Registration: Why U.S. Companies Need More Than a Filing Agent.
What China Customs Recordation Does
Registering a trademark in China does not put China Customs to work on your behalf. Customs maintains an intellectual property database separate from the trademark register, and recording your China IP rights with the General Administration of Customs puts them into the system officers use when they screen imports and exports. The recordation gives Customs notice of your rights, the information officers need to tell your goods from counterfeits, and someone to call when a shipment gets stopped.
You can ask Customs to detain a specific shipment without a recordation, but only if you know about the shipment before it moves, and few brand owners have any visibility into what counterfeiters load into a container. Recordation solves that. Once your right sits in the database, Customs can stop suspect goods and notify you on its own initiative, without your ever knowing the shipment existed.
Recordation reaches the border and stops there. It does nothing about counterfeits made and sold inside China, pulls down no online listings, resolves no fight with your factory, and generates no damages. What a detention gives you is evidence, and evidence is what the tools that do those things usually lack.
Get the China Registration Right First
Customs recordation rests on rights that already exist in China and creates none of its own. For a trademark, that means a registration effective in mainland China, obtained by filing directly with the China National Intellectual Property Administration or by designating China through the Madrid System. Your U.S., EU, or UK registration gives you nothing in China.
Companies that manufacture in China without selling there need China trademark protection as much as anyone, because their marks travel on products, labels, packaging, and cartons through Chinese factories and out through Chinese ports. If someone else registers the mark first, that person can use China's own legal system to interfere with your exports. Manufacturing in China but Not Selling There? Your China Trademark Strategy Should Be Defensive, Focused, and Fast explains how to prioritize those filings.
Either route will support a recordation, and we file directly. China's subclass system is where otherwise valid registrations fail, and a direct filing gives your counsel control over the subclasses that a Madrid designation does not. The Madrid System for Trademarks: Powerful, But Not Always the Right Tool sets out the tradeoff for companies filing across many countries at once. Whichever route you take, the registration has to cover what is in the container. Our glove client's registration was genuine and valid and protected the wrong kind of gloves.
Customs also records copyrights and related rights, along with invention, utility model, and design patents protected under Chinese law. Trademarks do most of the practical work because an officer can spot a counterfeit mark on the product or the carton, while patent and copyright questions demand analysis nobody performs on a loading dock. Copyright and design patent recordations still earn their place when counterfeiters copy artwork, packaging, or the shape of the product itself, and a China design patent is worth recording whenever appearance drives the sale.
When the Squatter Filed First
Trademark squatters have learned to use the border. Register the mark in the right class and subclass, record it with Customs, and you can stop the rightful owner's exports cold while storage charges run and customers wait. Trademark Squatters Are Coming for Your Supply Chain in Swarms Now describes how organized this has become.
Customs will not decide who ought to own the mark. Officers compare the goods in front of them against the rights recorded in China, and your earlier use in the United States, your thirty-year history with the brand, and the registrant's transparent bad faith settle nothing at the port. That fight belongs to CNIPA and, on appeal, to the Chinese courts. Where a mark has gone unused for three consecutive years you can file a non-use cancellation and force the registrant to prove qualifying use, and against a newer registration, or one backed by evidence of use, you need an invalidation on bad faith or another ground. A non-use cancellation runs many months. An invalidation runs a year or more at CNIPA, longer if the registrant appeals. Neither timetable helps a container sitting at Yantian today.
Companies caught this way attack the registration and, while they wait, do the unsatisfying things: reroute the shipment, strip the disputed mark where the product allows it, redesign the packaging, or buy the registration from the squatter.
After Someone Else Files First
We represented a Canadian coat maker whose shipment China Customs detained on the strength of a registration belonging to somebody else. Our client had sold under the brand for years and had never registered it in China. The company that had registered it was willing to talk. Our client wanted to sue, and we looked at the evidence we could assemble, at how long a CNIPA proceeding would take, and at what each additional week of detention was costing, and we bought the trademark instead. The price ran into six figures. Registering the mark in the first place would have cost [amount]. China Trademark Registration: How to Stop Squatters from Stealing Your Brand tells that story in full.
We have also fought and won. A German manufacturer already producing in China found that an unrelated Chinese company had filed its mark first. We opposed that filing as bad faith and filed an application for our client at the same time. CNIPA refused our client's application because the opposition was still pending, so we filed a second application and appealed the refusal. The opposition succeeded, the squatter's registration came off the register, and the appeal went our way. Getting there took two applications, an opposition, a refusal, and an appeal, and it took [X years]. Harris Sliwoski Wins China Trademark Appeal sets out the full sequence.
Which path fits depends on what your evidence supports and what the delay is costing you. Both cost more than filing first by an order of magnitude. File in China before the squatter does.
Build a Recordation an Officer Can Use
The application identifies you and the right you are recording. It then asks for the material that makes the right usable, meaning the protected goods, your licensing arrangements, the manufacturers and exporters authorized to handle your goods, and what you know about the infringement. Supporting documents run to proof of identity, registration particulars for the underlying right, and a power of attorney where an agent files. Foreign-language documents need Chinese translations, and Customs can ask for more when something in the file does not add up.
The trademark certificate is where the application starts and not where it ends. Customs already knows what mark was registered and who owns it. The question an officer faces is whether the shipment in front of him bearing that mark is yours, so tell Customs whose it is. If your factory exports through a trading company, name the trading company. If three factories build the product, name all three, and name the licensees and distributors who ship legitimate goods. Leave any of them out and your own containers start to look like the counterfeit ones.
This is where recordations fail most often, and the failure is mundane. A company lists its original factory, adds a second supplier the following year, and never touches the filing again. Customs detains an authorized shipment because the database shows an exporter nobody identified.
Photographs get the same neglect. The officer comparing a carton against your filing needs to see how your goods look in transit, which means labels, serial numbers, security features, the exact placement of the mark, and the model and color combinations you do not make. Studio photography against a white background tells an inspector nothing he can use in a container yard. Give Customs what you know about the counterfeiters too. Suspect factories, exporters, destination markets, ports, price points, and shipping patterns let officers target inspections instead of storing your registration in a database.
Under China's Regulations on Customs Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, Customs has 30 working days from a complete application to decide whether to approve the recordation. Approval runs ten years so long as the underlying right stays valid, and you renew during the six months before it expires. Changes to recorded information must be filed within 30 working days, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because factories change, trading companies change, packaging gets redesigned, and the employee who handled all of it leaves. Customs can revoke a recordation when your failure to keep it current interferes with lawful trade or with Customs supervision. An outdated recordation is worse than no recordation, because it hands officers wrong information carrying the authority of an official filing.
The Three Working Days You Get
When Customs finds goods it suspects infringe a recorded right, it notifies the rights holder, who has three working days from service of that notice to request detention and post the required security. Miss it and Customs cannot keep holding the goods under this procedure.
A great deal has to happen inside those three days. Someone has to receive the notice and understand what it is, someone who knows the product has to decide whether the goods are genuine, and the company has to authorize the expense, instruct Chinese counsel or its Customs agent, file the detention request, and arrange the security. A notice sent to an employee who left in March expires unread, and so does one sent to an info@ address nobody watches, and the fifteen hours between China and the United States eat a meaningful part of the window before anyone in your office is awake.
Build the response before Customs finds anything. Name a primary contact and a backup, decide in advance who can approve a detention, make sure that person can reach both counsel and the employee who knows the product, and work out how you will post security. [Insert the detention we handled: how the notice came in, what day, how long it took to get security posted, what it cost, what nearly went wrong.]
What Recordation Costs
As of September, 2026, China Customs charges no government fee for the recordation itself. Your money goes out when Customs detains something. Where Customs identifies the goods and you request detention, the security follows three tiers. Goods worth less than RMB 20,000 require security equal to their value. Goods worth between RMB 20,000 and RMB 200,000 require 50 percent of value, with a floor of RMB 20,000. Goods worth more than RMB 200,000 require RMB 100,000, and that RMB 100,000 is a ceiling no matter how large the shipment.
That ceiling is the financial argument for recordation. Ask Customs to stop a shipment outside the recorded-right procedure and you post security up to the full value of the goods, and Customs releases the shipment if no enforcement-assistance notice arrives from a court within 20 working days of detention. The recorded-right procedure also puts Customs to work. It has 30 working days from detention to determine whether the goods infringe, and if it cannot decide, it tells you, and you can go to court for an order. The goods can stay detained up to 50 working days while that runs.
If you expect detentions to repeat, ask about a general guarantee instead of arranging security shipment by shipment. GACC Announcement No. 31 of 2006 makes this available for repeated detention requests involving recorded trademark rights. The amount tracks the storage, custody, and disposal expenses your detentions generated over the previous year, and where there were none, or where they came to less than RMB 200,000, the guarantee is set at RMB 200,000. The bank guarantee runs from issuance through June 30 of the following year, while its approved use for detention requests ends on December 31 of the approval year, the extra six months existing so the parties can settle liabilities from detentions requested during the year. A general guarantee does not make storage, custody, and disposal costs disappear. You still pay those. What it spares you is a new bond every time a notice arrives.
When Customs finds infringement it can confiscate the goods and penalize whoever is responsible. Confiscated goods go to public welfare use, to the rights holder by sale, or to auction once the infringing features come off, and where those features cannot come off, Customs destroys the goods. Stripping a counterfeit mark off imported goods does not put them back into ordinary commercial channels. You pay the storage, custody, and disposal costs and can pursue them from the infringer as reasonable enforcement expenses, though an operation that just lost a container tends to be gone before anyone collects.
Train the Officers Who Will Make the Call
Customs officers see thousands of brands and cannot carry the identifying details of each one in their heads. Training the officers at the ports your goods move through is worth more than most of what companies spend on enforcement, and it is worth the most when the real product and the fake one look alike. Show them where the serial number sits, which companies legitimately export your goods, what your current packaging looks like, and which model and color combinations do not exist. Skip the company history and the mission statement. The officer needs to know what to look at on a carton.
One detention gave a client of ours considerably more than a destroyed shipment. The company, a Puerto Rican maker of electonic devices had recorded its rights and answered the Customs notice inside the deadline. Customs confirmed the goods were counterfeit and destroyed them, and the file from that single container gave us the exporter, the destination market, and the quantities. We used this information to greatly reduce counterfeits of our client's products.
A detention is intelligence as much as it is a stopped shipment. Exporter names, ports, destinations, quantities, and packaging details feed a factory raid, an administrative action, platform takedowns, a civil case, or a criminal referral. Treat each detention as an isolated event and you stop one container; read five of them together and you will usually see who is making the goods and how they move.
Where a Mainland Recordation Does Not Reach
Mainland China and Hong Kong run separate trademark and customs systems. Your mainland registration creates no trademark rights in Hong Kong, and your China Customs recordation tells the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department nothing. If your goods transit Hong Kong, you need Hong Kong registrations and Hong Kong enforcement, and counterfeiters know exactly how many foreign brands cover the mainland and forget Hong Kong.
The other gap sits at the far end of the shipment. China Customs stops counterfeits on the way out, while U.S., EU, and UK customs stop them on the way in, and the two systems see different containers under different rules. A brand recorded only in China has covered the departure. Our discussion of 360-degree trademark protection explains how the layers fit together.
Put It to Work
Recordation earns priority where branded goods are made in China for export, where counterfeits have already surfaced, or where fakes create safety, warranty, or reputational exposure. It does not mean recording every mark you own. Start with the marks on the products most likely to be copied, confirm each registration covers the right class and subclass for what you actually ship, name every factory, trading company, licensee, and exporter authorized to touch the goods, and settle now who answers the phone when the notice comes. The filing is easy. Keeping your own goods moving while stopping someone else's is the real work.
