Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Rights in China

Recalling the history of China’s pharmaceutical intellectual property right (IPR) protection in the past 20 years, China adopted many international standards for pharmaceutical IPR protection. At the same time, China also issued a series of national regulatory policies to encourage domestic drug innovations (Ding, J Technol Manage Innov 6(2):1–13, 2011) . Therefore, both those policies for incentive innovations and the IPR laws have played important roles in drug development in China. As declared by the 17th National Congress in 2006, China’s national development core strategy has prioritized the adherence to regulatory policies in order to construct a technologically innovative country and the country also wishes to become a global leading country for the implementation of the intellectual properties by 2020 as declared in the “National Intellectual Property Strategy Compendium” by Chinese State Council in 2008. In this chapter, we’ll briefly introduce the basic knowledge of the Chinese IPR system, the key regulatory policies, and the differences between China and western countries. We hope this section for Pharmaceutical Patent Protection may help overseas and multinational pharmaceutical companies gain basic knowledge of IPR, design an optimized IPR protection strategy to best fit their products, and achieve a successful product protection for their intellectual property in China.