How does the US-China patent war play out?

China to surpass US in international patent applications in 2023

Chinese inventors led the world in international patent applications for the second consecutive year, with about 14,000 more applications than the second-ranked US, according to 2023 data from the United Nations.

This comes as the two powers increasingly compete in technology, innovation and international standing. Earlier this month, Chinese Premier Li Qingqiang announced a 10% increase in government spending on science and technology research, while the US Congress is still debating the budget for science and technology research.

China has long been criticized for focusing on the quantity of patents rather than the quality of them, and for over-subsidizing applicants. So the country has recently begun weeding out shoddy research and substandard applications.

Mr. Robert Atkinson - President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) based in the US, and also a member of President Biden's economic advisory team, said: "China's patent filing reflects the country's potential technological capabilities. Therefore, from now until the end of this decade, if we do not respond comprehensively and seriously, everything will be too late."

However, some analysts say China's weakening economy and rapidly aging population will hamper its innovation trajectory, shifting momentum back to the United States.

China filed 69,610 patent applications under the United Nations Patent Cooperation Treaty in 2023, compared with 55,678 for the United States, according to data released in March by the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo). The 1970 treaty allows inventors to file an international patent in several countries at the same time, avoiding the cost of filing in multiple jurisdictions.

US to surpass China in 2023 national innovation index

Meanwhile, assessing the progress of the two superpowers in the battle for technological dominance is also controversial as determining the cause and effect relationship between patent filings and commercial products, industries and economic activities is not simple.

“I don’t think we have the final answer in measuring innovation, it’s always been more of an art than a science,” said Carsten Fink, chief economist at Wipo, which oversees the UN agency’s Global Innovation Index.

Wipo's 2023 index, which combines 80 factors, ranked Switzerland as the world's most innovative country, followed by Sweden and the United States. China ranked 12th out of 132 economies surveyed, but topped the list of upper-middle-income countries, followed by Malaysia and Bulgaria.

How do other metrics perform?

Other measures also show mixed results. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Intellectual Property Index, which uses 50 criteria including patents, commercialization and efficiency, ranked the United States first and China 24th among 55 economies.

Meanwhile, the Bloomberg Innovation Index ranked the US 6th and China 22nd out of 50 countries based on six criteria, including spending on research and development, manufacturing, research and patents.

Meanwhile, the ITIF Hamilton Index shows that China leads in 7 out of 10 strategically important industries, including computers, electronics and chemicals, while the US leads in 3: information technology, pharmaceuticals and transportation.

In 2023, Qualcomm and Microsoft were the top US companies filing international patents, while Huawei Technologies and battery maker CATL led the Chinese side.

Every country encourages patent filing, but analysts say China has taken it to a new level. In its desperate bid to innovate and achieve global rankings and standards under the “Made in China 2025” roadmap, Chinese applicants can enjoy subsidies that exceed the cost of filing, an incentive to file multiple patents for the same invention for income, fame and academic advancement.

Western patent systems generally place more emphasis on proving an invention is globally unique, compared with China's more domestically focused and lax standards, experts say.

Beijing is also working to crack down on plagiarism in academic papers and sharply reduce poorly reviewed patents by 2023, while increasing the proportion of patents that are thoroughly examined, according to a report by China's State Council.

Since its first patent was filed in 1985, China has often been criticized abroad for lacking innovation, not publishing enough scientific papers, etc.

The US remains the leading country in spending on research and development.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the US is still the leading country in total spending on research and development (R&D), with 806 billion USD annually, compared to 668 billion USD of China.

And while China was predicted to surpass the US in total R&D spending, that has yet to happen, amid huge demographic challenges, a real estate crisis, rising domestic debt and slowing economic growth.

The US economy, on the other hand, has shown surprising resilience, with low unemployment and some $200 billion in new investment in R&D through the Science and Chips Act of 2022.

Deep political divisions and budget battles in Washington have hurt government R&D, which fuels private-sector innovation, with the US National Science Foundation's budget, for example, falling 8.3% this year.

Experts say China’s management system makes it easier to set up and execute national-level campaigns. Many senior leaders in China have engineering degrees, while the United States seems to have lost its sense of “national mission” after the end of the Cold War.

“The United States has many actions that are self-defeating. We cannot blame everything on China,” said Mark Cohen, director of the Asia Intellectual Property Project at the University of California, USA.

China's growing patent prowess has failed to awaken the US tech community in part because of the country's inherent divisions, said an intellectual property lawyer who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of US-China relations.

Patents are important for large hardware companies, protecting against copying physical designs. However, they are less useful for startups struggling to survive. Software companies often view patents as something imperfect, but acceptable because they are largely ineffective at protecting their secrets, including business models, data quantity and quality, and trade secrets.

This is why, although China filed 2.5 times more patents on artificial intelligence (AI) technology than the US in 2018, this does not mean that the US is lagging behind in the field of AI innovation.