The 100 years since the founding of the Communist Party of China have seen China making tremendous progress under the leadership of the Party. This is borne out from the number of patent applications from China.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization's annual report, the number of patent applications submitted by China via the Patent Cooperation Treaty reached 68,720 in 2020, higher than the 59,230 the United States submitted. This is the first time that China submitted the highest number of patent applications in the world, breaking the monopoly of the West. In 2015, China became the first country whose number of domestic patent applications exceeded 1 million.

All these are proof of the Chinese people's creativity and acumen for innovation. Thanks to the country's technological strategy and good intellectual property rights protection system, China is on course to become an indispensable player in the global patents sector. Credit for this goes to the Party for its efforts to improve the IPR protection system. Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China enacted regulations on trademarks and patent protection, something that has proved beneficial for China.

As we mark the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding, we are looking forward to the future. At this year's annual session, the National People's Congress, or China's top legislature, passed the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), which treats the number of high-value patent ownership per million people as a main social and economic development indicator, and suggests measures for better protecting and encouraging high-value patents.

That in turn requires responsible agencies to adopt a stronger innovation-promotion strategy on patents, and shift from the pursuit of quantity to the pursuit of quality. Agencies such as the China National Intellectual Property Administration will take more detailed measures in this regard.

In a nutshell, the increasing number and quality of patents have supported Chinese people's prosperity and will continue to do so.