Chinese premier urges fair competition in building unified national market

Chinese Premier Li Qiang has called for new progress and breakthroughs in the building of a unified national market to effectively support the nation's new development paradigm and high-quality development. The premier made the remarks during a themed study session of the State

Council, or the cabinet, which he chaired on Monday. Li said that to push forward the construction of a unified national market, it is necessary to fully leverage China's advantages, such as its super-large market scale, abundance in production factors and complete industrial system, as well as removing the key obstacles that hinder the flow of the economy...

Chinese courts tackling plant variety patent cases

Chinese courts have been dealing with many cases involving the patents of new varieties of plants, Tao Kaiyuan, vice-president of the Supreme People's Court, the nation's top court, told a news conference on Thursday. Tao cited data as revealing that the SPC's Intellectual Property

Court, a national-level IP court, handled 18,924 cases from January 2019, when it was established, to December last year. Of those cases, 15,710 have been concluded. She said that a large number of lawsuits heard in the IP court involved foreign litigants, adding that the fair and efficient handling of the cases has helped improved the country's judicial credibility in the world. "More foreign enterprises have chosen Chinese courts to solve their IP disputes, and our country is also becoming one of the preferred venues for resolving international IP litigation," she said. He Zhonglin, first deputy chief judge of the IP court, said that the court has always attached great importance to protecting IP rights in the seed industry...

China promotes patent industrialization in universities, research institutions

China will establish efforts to promote the patent industrialization rate of universities and research institutions nationwide, said the country's top intellectual property regulator on Tuesday. The National Intellectual Property Administration has initiated a work plan, proposing that by the end

of 2024, universities and scientific research institutions across the country should conduct assessments on their underutilized patents and accelerate the process of industrializing a selection of their high-value patents by the end of 2025. The number of valid invention patents in Chinese universities reached 794,000 by the end of 2023, with scientific research institutions holding an additional 229,000 patents. These figures collectively account for a quarter of the total patents in the country, said Wang Peizhang, a senior NIPA official, at a press conference. He also highlighted the existence of dormant patents, saying this has been "a common phenomenon" in these institutions. In response to this, the IP administration collaborated with seven departments, including the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology, to issue the work plan to enhance the industrialization of invention patents...

Chinese researchers use muons imaging technology to detect mine

A Chinese research team has successfully used muons imaging technology to detect the internal structure of a mineral deposit, providing a new approach to mineral exploration and geological structure imaging. The research results were recently published online in the

Geophysical Journal International. The exploration of underground orebodies and the precise location of goaf areas have been some of the challenges faced by the mining industry. Traditional mineral exploration techniques have high economic cost and low accuracy. As one of the fundamental particles in nature, muons have a significant penetration capability, which can realize non-contact, deep penetrating, and non-destructive imaging of large objects. Compared with conventional artificial ray devices, they have incomparable advantages, said Liu Zhiyi, research leader at Lanzhou University...