A recent decision by China’s Supreme People’s Court upheld an administrative penalty imposed for the unauthorized production, propagation, and sale of the protected grape variety IFG Six, marketed as Sweet Sapphire™/甜蜜蓝宝石®. The dispute arose in Binchuan County (宾川县), Yunnan Province, where the local agricultural authority—the Binchuan Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs—investigated and sanctioned a grower for infringing plant variety rights held by Bloom Fresh International Limited, the right holder and complainant. That penalty was challenged and ultimately upheld through judicial review by the Supreme People’s Court, thereby closing the administrative enforcement track at the highest level of the judiciary.

The complainant in the Binchuan matter is Bloom Fresh International Limited (Bloom Fresh), and the protected variety was IFG Six / Sweet Sapphire, a grape variety. Bloom Fresh’s Chief Legal Officer, Alanna Rennie, is an intellectual property specialist with long experience in the field of plant variety protection. I have not located a dedicated press release, published case summary, judgment text, enforcement detail, or official announcement regarding this matter on Bloom Fresh’s corporate website or other public-facing materials. Public understanding of the case therefore depends largely on secondary industry and practitioner reporting rather than direct corporate or official disclosure.

China’s statutory framework provides explicit legal authority (法律, falv) for administrative enforcement of plant variety rights alongside civil litigation. Article 72 of the Seed Law of the People’s Republic of China (《中华人民共和国种子法》) provides that a plant variety right holder or other interested party may either bring a civil action for infringement before a people’s court or request the competent agriculture and rural affairs department, or forestry and grassland department, to handle the dispute as an administrative matter. That same provision authorizes the administrative department to order cessation of infringement, confiscation of unlawful gains and infringing propagating material, and the imposition of administrative fines. The Regulations on the Protection of New Plant Varieties (《植物新品种保护条例》) further implement this framework by elaborating the scope of rights and enforcement mechanisms.

The Binchuan IFG Six enforcement decision fits within a broader, long-observed pattern of limited foreign utilization of Chinese intellectual-property enforcement mechanisms, particularly administrative channels. This is a pattern that I have previously discussed in connection with foreign participation in China’s trademark-focused administrative enforcement system and the comparatively limited use of administrative remedies by foreign right holders in other IP fields. Administrative enforcement actions initiated by U.S. and other foreign right holders in China have historically been concentrated in the trademark area, with comparatively limited use of administrative channels for copyright, patent, or other intellectual property rights. This skew likely reflects both the relative ease and visibility of trademark raids and enduring concerns among foreign firms regarding transparency, evidentiary standards, and predictability in non-judicial administrative proceedings. Administrative cases may also be more effective where enforcement operates within a broader regulatory framework governing the underlying activity, as has historically been the case with copyright enforcement working within content-regulation regimes such as censorship, and with plant varieties overseen by agricultural regulatory authorities. However, the extent to which such overlaps influence IP enforcement outcomes remains unclear. as IP enforcement data may become commingled with regulatory enforcement data.

Against this backdrop of historically low foreign participation in administrative enforcement, the Binchuan IFG Six plant-variety case is particularly notable and sends a positive signal to foreign rights holders Unlike most prominent foreign-involved IP disputes in China, which have proceeded through civil litigation and resulted in publicly reported judicial decisions, Binchuan arose from an administrative penalty imposed by a local agricultural authority. The case therefore illustrates both the formal availability and potential practical viability of administrative enforcement for foreign right holders. Nonetheless, due to the lack of public access to the full texts of the relevant administrative decision and the Supreme People’s Court’s judicial review ruling, the case is presently limited in its ability to contribute to the development of replicable intellectual-property enforcement strategies in China. Hopefully, the judicial and administrative agencies will release their decisions publicly in the near future.

The author visiting a jasmine flower farm in Guangxi Province circa 2008.