WIPO recently published an authoritative report which showed that China's intellectual property cause had played an ever increasing role in the international arena. The "World Intellectual Property Indicators Report (2009)" described the situation of China's IPR: from1995 to 2007, China's State Intellectual Property Office saw an average annual growth rate of 23.9% on invention patent applications, much higher than its European and the United States' counterparts; in 2008, the high-tech company of China, Huawei, topped the PCT Applications Chart for the first time; 2007 witnessed 20.6% of the trade mark applications around the globe owing to China; global design patent applications' rapid growth was primarily due to the surge of applications in China.

The report was extended from the "World Patent Report" 2006 version issued by WIPO, covering four categories of development in the IP arena, namely invention patents, utility model patents, trademarks and design patents. Its data mainly came from the WIPO Statistics Database, annual reports from countries' national IP management departments, the World Bank, UNESCO, the trilateral statistical reports.

In terms of trademarks, in 2007, approximately 3.3 million trademark applications were submitted around the world, a 1.6% increase compared to 2006. However, current available data show that in 2008 the total trademark applications tended to have a negative growth. In 2007, 20.6% of the world total trademark applications was ascribed to China, 9.2% to the United States. Chinese residents and U.S. residents enjoyed the largest shares of the trademark registration. They each accounted for 11% of the total in 2007.

At the same time, the report also showed that there was still a huge gap between China and developed countries' R & D capabilities in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, transportation and other major fields.