China’s Shenzhen People’s Procuratorate has recently released a white paper report on criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights. This is an unprecedented publication to take stock of the intellectual property criminal cases in Shenzhen city, Guangdong province between 2017 and 2021.

During the time, the procuratorial authorities in Shenzhen approved the arrest of 3,433 criminal suspects by conducting investigations in 1,801 IP infringement cases and prosecuted 3,169 criminal suspects by by conducting investigations in 1,705 IP infringement cases. On a yearly basis, the numbers of cases and criminal suspects trended up in the first three years with 358 cases and 680 suspects registered in 2017, 439 cases and 760 suspects registered in 2018, and 394 cases and 739 suspects registered in 2019. The number of cases and criminal suspects trended down in the latter two years with 292 cases and 517 suspects registered in 2020 and 222 cases and 473 suspects registered in 2021.

Over 97% of cases were trademark infringement ones. The numbers of trademark infringement cases and suspects accounted for 97.5% and 97.04% of the totals respectively. 58.9% of cases were filed against counterfeiting registered trademarks and 33.3% counterfeiting goods using registered trademarks. The numbers of copyright infringement cases accounted for 1.84% and 1.9% of the totals respectively. The numbers of trade secret misappropriation accounted for 0.66% and 1.06% of the totals respectively.

The full text is available here.