Recently, China National Intellectual Property Administration ("CNIPA") and State Administration for Market Regulation ("SAMR") jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on Further Strengthening the Geographical Indication Protection (the "Opinions").

The Opinions consist of six parts, including strengthening administrative protection of geographical indications, and specify contents such as enhancing the quality control of application for the geographical indication protection, enhancing the registration management for the enterprise names involving geographical indications and improving the protection mechanism for foreign-related geographical indication. Among others, the Opinions call for improving the rule of law in geographical indication protection. While building the mechanism for geographical indication protection, it is also required to strengthen the protection of primary agricultural products, processed food, authentic medicinal materials and folk handicrafts. The Opinions also stress the need to strictly crack down on infringement and counterfeit related to geographical indication. More efforts shall be made to regulate and punish the "free-riding" behavior in geographical indications, such as using paraphrase, transliteration or word-by-word translation, or indicating the characters of "type", "variety", "style" or "pattern" in naming any identical or similar product.

(Source: China National Intellectual Property Administration)