Donald Trump’s ten-year Trademark Case in China: Statutory-Law-Upheld Intellectual Property Rights Ignored by State Apparatus

The present article on Donald Trump’s trademark case in China takes recourse to a specific sort of P.R.C statute law, the Trademark Law, to investigate the validity of the decision and rulings by the state apparatus like the Trademark Bureau, Trademark Review Committee and People’s Courts, and finds out that provisions of the Trademark Law are ignored by the Bureaus and Courts. The dispute and lawsuits start in 2006; Donald Trump loses the case in middle of 2015 by the final ruling from Beijing Higher People’s Court. By scrutinizing the relevant Articles of the Trademark Law, especially Article 13 and Article 31, it is discovered that Donald Trump’s name rights and his trademark “TRUMP” are explicitly supported by the P.R.C. Trademark Law, which was amended in 2001 to better suit China’s joining of the World Trade Organization in 2001 on intellectual property rights protection. Donald Trump’s name rights granted by Article 31 is illustrated by the retrial ruling in late 2016 on Michael Jordan’s trademark case by P.R.C. Supreme People’s Court; and his right on trademark “TRUMP” is explained on a law journal in 2019 by a judge from Beijing Higher People’s Court. But, the case is still a closed case Trump lost.