What is special about the Chinese classification system and what would be the strategy?

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Editor's Note: Consider the core classes and relative classes, and choose the classes upon your own needs.

China is a member of the Niche classification system, so generally Chinese classification system is almost the same as in your own country.

The key here is China will not require evidence of use unless until a cancellation process is initiated by a challenger. One interesting point to note, in the United States, it will be compulsorily required to provide the evidence of use at the time of registration of a trademark, the applicant will bear more cost if he fails to provide evidence of use. Just to the opposite, in China, the challenger has to pay the fees in a cancellation process.

Under such system, there are a lot of applicants apply trademarks on different classes. For foreigners, this is a real challenge. I.e. if the foreigner is a professional clothing maker, the core class would be class 25, namely clothes and shoes. But a Chinese applicant may apply the same trademark for bags, namely class 18, without even provision of evidence of use – this is what I would call the relative classes. For the foreigner, if one day his product line expands to bags, he has a problem.

To sum up, it will be recommended to consider a larger scope of classes and include the core classes and relative classes.