China Revises Rules on Standards Development Procedures involving Patents

On 24 August 2026, the National Standardization Administration (SAC) released for public comment the draft revision of GB/T 20003.1, Special procedures for the development of standards – Part 1: Standards related to patents, developed under the 2025 national standardization plan (Project No. 20252139-T-424) and administered by the National Technical Committee on Standardization Principles and Methods (SAC/TC 286). Once adopted, the revised standard will replace GB/T 20003.1—2014, which has governed patent disclosure, licensing declarations and information publication in national standard development for over a decade. The Comment period will open until 26 October 2026.

According to the drafting explanatory document, the 2014 edition has been widely referenced but practice has outpaced the text: patents that should have been disclosed were not, disclosures were often irregular, and stakeholder responsibilities remained unclear. The revision also implements the National Standardization Development Outline (2021), which calls for a sound standards-essential patent regime.

The drafting follows four principles: problem orientation, normative rigor in line with GB/T 1.1—2020, coordination with domestic laws and interim patent regulations, and practical operability. Notably, the reference list reaches well beyond domestic rules: the ISO/IEC/ITU Common Patent Policy and its five implementation guides, CEN-CENELEC Guide 8 on standardization and intellectual property, and the IPR policies of ETSI, IEEE and ASTM.

Against the 2014 edition, the draft moves closer to international practice.

Clause 4.1.1: the disclosure duty becomes one of “reasonable efforts”, echoing the conduct standard in the Common Patent Policy implementation guides;
Clause 4.1.3: disclosures must be verifiable against official patent records;
Clause 4.2.4: under the three FRAND-based options retained from 2014, declarations now bind successive assignees as the patent changes hands.

The drafting document is candid about the limits of alignment: no directly equivalent international standard exists, so the revision stays consistent with international principles of early disclosure and FRAND licensing while running through China’s own eight-stage standard development procedure.

Taken together, the draft tightens procedural discipline without reshaping the 2014 architecture: disclosures are harder to defer, declarations harder to escape, and late surprises at the approval stage harder to ignore (Clauses 5.6.2 and 5.6.4). Two further changes are domestic rather than international in nature: the definition of an essential claim is reworded from “inevitably infringed” to “inevitably practiced” (Clause 3.1), and the reference scope extends to group standards (Clause 1). For a field where Chinese and international standards increasingly interact, the added transparency cuts both ways: it raises the compliance bar for participants while making China’s SEP rules easier to read from outside.

For European stakeholders, this international alignment brings predictability, but the China-specific procedural details still mean homework. SESEC recommends that companies active in Chinese technical committees, SEP holders and research institutions examine the new disclosure and assignment provisions closely, assess their declaration and portfolio practices against the draft, and submit comments within the consultation window, whether directly or through Chinese partners and mirror structures. SESEC has translated the draft and its explanatory notes for European stakeholders.

SESEC VI Translation – Draft for Comment