Administration before legislation: Patent protection and innovation incentives in late Qing China (1898–1911) in comparative perspective

Administration before legislation: Patent protection and innovation incentives in late Qing China (1898–1911) in comparative perspective

Journal article

1 volume.

The first sustained Chinese practice of issuing patent-like certificates was not founded on a patent statute. Between 1904 and 1911 the newly created Ministry of Commerce (Shangbu) granted exclusive certificates (zhuanzhao) to individual inventors and improvers, Chinese and foreign, on the authority of a single article in the 1903 Simplified Regulations for Chambers of Commerce, supplemented by ministerial directives. The practice outran, and for a time substituted for, formal legislation. This article reconstructs that arrangement from Chinese-language archival scholarship largely unfamiliar to the English-language patent literature and sets it beside two contrasting trajectories of the same decades: Meiji Japan, which built its patent office on the comprehensive 1885 ordinance, and the Ottoman Empire, which translated the 1844 French code almost verbatim in 1879 and obtained a formally complete but lightly used regime. The three cases support a distinction the transplantation literature tends to miss: patent protection can be produced through the practice of a capable bureaucracy as well as through a statute. The article calls the Chinese pattern administrative precedence, situates it within Sacco's theory of legal formants, and draws out the implications for patent offices whose administrative capacity runs ahead of their legislative machinery. Because these grants survive only as scattered administrative and press records, it also treats the zhuanzhao as an object of patent documentation, mapping what a certificate recorded onto modern bibliographic patent data and showing where such records are found and why a grant system of this kind is misread by analyses that begin from statute dates and filing counts.

Crossref

World Patent Information ; 86, September, 2026

World Patent Information

Oxford [England] : Elsevier Ltd., 2026.

English

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0172219023000108

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