From October 5 to 8, Beijing time, the 13th session of the working group on the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the 31st session of the technical cooperation committee were held in Geneva, Switzerland. Deng Hongsen, the new director general of WIPO, attended the opening ceremony and delivered a speech. Dong Cheng, a candidate nominated by the Chinese side and deputy director of Guangdong patent examination cooperation center of the Patent Office of the State Intellectual Property Office of China, was successfully elected as the chairman of the meeting and remotely presided over the meeting through online means. This is the first time that a Chinese representative has assumed the post of chairman at the relevant meeting of the WIPO PCT working group.
It is understood that novel coronavirus pneumonia is the reason for the outbreak. The conference was convened under the mixed mode of online and offline, and the agenda of the conference was also properly compressed. The new form of conference and the way of remote hosting have brought challenges to the close cooperation, hosting and guiding of the president and the WIPO Secretariat. With the joint cooperation and efforts of the WIPO Secretariat, WIPO China office, the working team of the State Intellectual Property Office of China and the participating delegation of other countries, the agenda of the meeting went smoothly and achieved the expected results, which provided useful experience for remote hosting of regular committee or working group meetings.
According to reports, since joining the PCT system in 1994, with the development of China's intellectual property industry, China's annual PCT patent applications have also maintained a momentum of rapid growth. In 2019, the number of PCT patent applications in China jumped to the first place in the world for the first time, realizing a historic breakthrough. This time, Dong Cheng was elected and successfully presided over a series of meetings of the WIPO PCT working group, which not only reflected China's growing influence in the WIPO PCT system and even in the global intellectual property field, but also reflected China's active support and participation in the multilateral intellectual property system represented by WIPO and its contribution to the balanced development of the system. (Yang Wenjing)