Amendment to the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China (11th Edition) (hereinafter referred to as the Amendment) has been passed on 26th December 2020 at the 24th meeting of 13th Session of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and has been implemented from 1st March 2021. 

For the relevant articles in this Amendment, major revisions were made to provisions on the intellectual property crime, the legal penalty has been raised. Penalty has been measured between 3 and 7 years in the Section 7 of Chapter 3, has been amended between 3 and 10 years, more seriously crack down on intellectual property crimes. It shows China’s relevant authority’s resolution on cracking down intellectual property crimes, it will help society to shape a new pattern of respecting intellectual property rights and innovation. 

The protection on “Service Trademark” has been added into the Amendment aiming to against the crime of counterfeiting the registered trademark. The service trademark means the logo used by the suppliers of service to differ service from others’ service. In this amendment, the service trademark and the goods’ trademark have the same protection level of the measurement of penalty. 

As per the recently amended copyright law, provisions are related to copyright infringement or other crimes on the copyrights have been amended, to strengthen efforts to crack down on copyright infringement. 

Meanwhile, for the crime on infringing commercial secret, especially, listed new provisions on electronic break-in, bribery. The scope of the crime on the infringement of commercial secret is extended to provide the foreign organizations or institution with illegal commercial secrets, enlarge the criminal types of the infringement on the commercial secrets. The amendment of this article serves all basis for the negotiation of Sino-U.S. economic and trade agreement.