1. Introduction and exploration of macro-system background
In today's era of global technological competition and the increasingly profound evolution of the intellectual property protection landscape, patent litigation has gone far beyond the scope of single technology disputes and has been upgraded to a core strategic means for multinational companies to engage in market gaming, technology blockade and core asset protection. As the two most influential intellectual property jurisdictions in the world, the United States and China have demonstrated fundamental structural differences based on different legal traditions and judicial philosophies in their patent litigation systems, especially evidence rules and technical fact-finding mechanisms. This difference is not only reflected in the formal comparison between statutory law and case law, but is also deeply reflected in the pace of litigation proceedings, the allocation of the parties’ initial burden of proof, the breadth of the pretrial discovery (Discovery) mechanism, and the fierce conflict between data sovereignty and national security laws in the extraterritorial effect. 1
The U.S. federal patent litigation system is rooted in the classic Adversarial System tradition of the Anglo-American legal system. Under this system, the judge plays more of a neutral referee role in the process, while the discovery of facts and the presentation of evidence completely rely on the confrontation and game between the parties. This tradition has given rise to the most core and most expensive mechanism in the American litigation system—the extensive pretrial evidence discovery process. Through extremely detailed document generation requests, interrogatories, witness depositions (depositions), and expert witness cross-examinations (Cross-Examination), U.S. courts aim to exhaust all possible information particles that touch the facts of the case. 1
On the contrary, China's patent litigation system is deeply influenced by the tradition of the Inquisitorial System of the civil law system. Chinese courts play an absolutely leading role in ascertaining technical facts, guiding the litigation process, and obtaining evidence ex officio 1 . China's civil litigation adheres to a strict initial burden of proof of "whoever claims, who provides evidence." The focus of litigation is highly forward-focused, and the system design completely excludes the American-style large-scale, mandatory pre-trial evidence discovery mechanism. 3 This judicial efficiency-oriented institutional arrangement enables Chinese patent litigation to be concluded at a very high speed, but it also creates a natural barrier for plaintiffs to obtain internal evidence from the accused infringing party.
Since 2025, with the comprehensive and in-depth implementation of China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and Data Security Law (DSL), as well as the latest judicial documents 5 such as the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People's Court's "Interpretation on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in the Trial of Patent Infringement Dispute Cases (III) (Draft for Comments)" (hereinafter referred to as the "2025 Judicial Interpretation of Patent Infringement (III)"), the conflict of evidence rules between China and the United States in cross-border patent litigation has become unprecedentedly complex and acute. When multinational companies respond to compulsory discovery orders from U.S. courts, they can easily fall into a "Catch-22" dilemma that violates the red line of China's data export and state secret protection 6. This report aims to exhaustively analyse the macro-system differences and micro-practical blind spots in the field of evidence rules in Sino-US patent litigation, reveal the legal motivations, second-level and third-level strategic impacts behind it, and provide highly practical compliance and bilateral litigation coordination suggestions for market entities involved in transnational intellectual property litigation.
2. The beginning of litigation: the institutional distinction between prosecution standards and initial burden of proof
In the filing stage at the beginning of the proceedings, patent litigation between China and the United States shows completely different tendencies in system design. This tendency directly determines the initial financial cost for the plaintiff to initiate litigation, the cycle span of case preparation, and the space for counterattack strategies of the defender in the early stages of litigation.
Notification-based prosecution and low-threshold filing of cases in the United States
The U.S. patent litigation system has relatively low threshold requirements for an initial complaint, and the “Notice Pleading” standard is generally applied. In practice, when a plaintiff files a complaint in a federal district court, he often only needs to make an allegation of infringement based on good faith in order for the case to enter the judicial process. 3 A standard U.S. patent infringement complaint only needs to contain a macro-level description of the allegedly infringing product or infringement, indicating the specific type of direct or indirect infringement, and the remedies sought (such as injunction, damages, treble compensation for intentional infringement, etc.) 2. The U.S. legal system never forces the plaintiff to include in the complaint an extremely detailed comparison table of technical features, conclusive internal technical documentation of infringement, or proof of precise calculation of damages. 2
The underlying legal logic of this system design is that since it is objectively difficult for the plaintiff to legally obtain the defendant’s internal confidential technical information before litigation, it should be allowed to start the lawsuit with relatively limited information, and then through a long and in-depth pre-trial evidence discovery process, the defendant’s internal technical documents, source code, design drawings and detailed financial data are legally forced to be mined, so as to gradually enrich and confirm its factual claims. 3 However, this low-threshold rule, which aims to balance information asymmetry, objectively provides the soil for institutional arbitrage for non-patent practicing entities (NPEs), allowing them to initiate litigation at very low initial costs and use the high cost of discovery in the United States as leverage to force the defendant to reach a settlement before entering a substantive trial. 2
China’s preemptive evidence and strict prosecution review
In sharp contrast to the United States, China's patent litigation system is a typical "front-loaded" evidence system. In the absence of the objective premise of a US-style compulsory evidence discovery mechanism, the Chinese People's Court requires plaintiffs to bear an extremely heavy initial burden of proof when filing a lawsuit. 3
The plaintiff needs to collect evidence completely independently through legal channels, which usually means that the plaintiff must exhaust public channels to search before filing a lawsuit, or obtain the accused infringing product through a notarized purchase. If necessary, it must also entrust a professional technical appraisal agency to conduct reverse engineering or product disassembly analysis 4. On this basis, the plaintiff must submit to the court complete and conclusive infringement comparison materials, that is, a strict "element-by-element" literal infringement or equivalent infringement comparison between each technical feature of the patent claim involved and the corresponding structure of the alleged infringing product. 7 In addition, the Chinese Civil Procedure Law sets strict formal review requirements for evidence generated overseas, requiring that relevant evidence must be notarized by a notary public in the country where it is located, authenticated by the Chinese embassy or consulate in that country, or obtain an Apostille, otherwise the court may not accept it during the case filing review or evidence cross-examination stages. 7
This strict front-end review rule has had a strategic impact on both sides. On the one hand, it effectively filters out a large number of abusive lawsuits that have no factual basis and ensures the effective allocation of judicial resources; but on the other hand, it also makes plaintiffs who lack internal technical information of the defendant—such as holders of method patents, core process patents, or complex communication standard essential patents (SEP)—face huge initial obstacles to obtaining evidence when defending their rights. 3
| Characteristics of the initial prosecution stage | U.S. Federal District Court Litigation Rules | Chinese People’s Court Litigation Rules |
|---|---|---|
| Standards for Complaint Requirements | Notification-type prosecution, a macro description is enough, and the case is filed based on good faith accusations 2. | For a front-end system, a detailed and thorough infringement comparison evidence chain must be submitted 3. |
| Initial evidence requirements | Very low, no need to provide underlying supporting documents for specific infringement analysis or compensation calculation 2. | Extremely high, feature level comparison needs to be completed, and overseas evidence must be notarized and certified 3. |
| Strategic Impact and Cost | The cost of prosecution is low and the case is filed quickly; but it will trigger an extremely expensive subsequent evidence discovery battle 3. | The cost of prosecution is high and the pre-litigation preparation time is long; however, after the case is filed, it proceeds very quickly, and the pressure on the defence increases sharply 3. |
| NPE Litigation Friendliness | High, often used as a leverage tool to force settlement with high discovery costs 2. | Lower, there must be substantial evidence of infringement before a case can be filed, curbing frivolous and nuisance lawsuits 3. |
3. Pretrial procedures and evidence discovery: the institutional game of comprehensive discovery and authority investigation
The most intense conflict between Chinese and American litigation rules focuses on the pretrial evidence collection mechanism. This institutional gap is not only the biggest practical impact faced by lawyers from the two countries when representing cross-border cases, but also the root cause of the huge differences in litigation schedules, financial costs and corporate compliance risks between the two countries.
Broad Discovery Rules (Discovery) in U.S. Federal Civil Litigation
The underlying logic of the American Civil Procedure Rules is to eliminate “surprise” in the courtroom and ensure that all facts that may affect the course of the case are brought to light. According to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), especially the revised Rule 26(b)(1), a party may request any non-privileged information that is relevant to the claim or defence of the case, as long as the scope of the request is proportional to the actual needs of the case (Proportional to the needs of the case) 8 .
In patent disputes, the evidence discovery procedure constitutes an extremely large and sophisticated systematic project, which usually covers the following core links:
1. Document Requests: The plaintiff has the right to request the defendant to provide extremely sensitive business secrets, such as the underlying source code (Source Code), complete product development logs, financial sales records, internal strategic emails and even instant messaging records of top managers.
2. Interrogatories: Written, specific factual questions that require the other party to answer under oath. They are often used to lock in the other party’s factual claims of infringement or non-infringement.
3. Witness depositions (Depositions): Allow one party’s lawyers to directly and severely conduct face-to-face oral cross-examinations of the other party’s key technical personnel, executives or experts outside the court, and the cross-examination records will be used as trial evidence 2.
Electronic evidence discovery (e-Discovery) is the most expensive and highest compliance risk area among the above links. The US system, with its "casting net" investigation concept, requires parties to preserve, collect, process, review and produce massive amounts of electronically stored information (ESI) 10 . For many Chinese companies, the lack of a mature enterprise-level document retention policy (Retention Policy) and the widespread habit of employees using personal computers to handle company business or using personal WeChat to discuss highly sensitive technical cooperation has resulted in a high degree of confusion between business data and personal privacy data1. Once faced with the collection of electronic evidence involved in litigation in the United States, Chinese companies often need to hire extremely expensive third-party technology providers to mirror and strip data. Not only are financial compliance costs staggering, but they also face great risks of leaking core secrets during the data sorting process.
China’s limited allocation of evidence and the court’s ex officio investigation and collection of evidence
Contrary to the adversarial full discovery system in the United States, Chinese civil litigation does not give parties the power to compel each other to provide massive documents. This directly contributes to the fast speed and relatively low cost of patent litigation in China, but it also makes parties extremely dependent on the intervention of judicial authorities when facing evidence blind spots 4 .
For hidden evidence that cannot be obtained by oneself (such as the defendant’s real financial sales flow, the process flow of a closed production line, or the source code of infringing software stored in the defendant’s internal server), the Chinese parties can only apply to the people’s court for pre-litigation or in-litigation evidence preservation in accordance with the provisions of the Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China, or apply for the court to investigate and collect evidence ex officio 1. However, in judicial practice, Chinese courts exercise extremely prudent discretion when deciding whether to initiate such state coercion for investigation. Under normal circumstances, only when the plaintiff has provided preliminary infringement evidence with considerable probative force and can prove that the key evidence is indeed in the exclusive control of the defendant and failure to take preservation measures may cause the evidence to be destroyed or difficult to obtain in the future, the court will issue a preservation order and dispatch police to enforce it7.
In recent years, in order to solve the deep-rooted problems of "difficulty in proof and low compensation" in patent rights protection, China's Supreme People's Court has continuously strengthened and refined the application of evidence obstruction (Spoliation) and the transfer of burden of proof systems. If the court has ordered the defendant to submit financial accounts or technical documents under its control in accordance with the law, but the defendant refuses to submit it without justifiable reasons, or maliciously submits false materials or conceals evidence, the court has the right to directly presume that the plaintiff's claims regarding the amount of damages or the facts of infringement are established. 5 In the "Judicial Interpretation of Patent Infringement (III) (Draft for Comments)" released in 2025, Article 30 achieves a further breakthrough in this legal theory: when the rights holder claims that the amount of compensation should be determined based on its actual losses, profits from infringement, or a reasonable multiple of the patent licence fee, and submits corresponding preliminary evidence that can be reasonably deduced, the people's court should support it, unless the defendant actively submits contrary evidence (such as true sales data and profit margin reports) and the rebuttal evidence is sufficient to overturn the plaintiff's calculation 11. This forward-looking rule revision is essentially a dynamic shift of the burden of proof within China's existing authoritarian trial framework, which skillfully simulates the deterrent effect of mandatory disclosure similar to that achieved by the US discovery system.
| Rights protection and trial efficiency | Expected litigation timetable in the United States | Expected litigation timetable in China |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Complaint to Defense | Usually completed within 1 month of filing 2. | It is necessary to reserve several months of notarization and certification and evidence chain compilation time 7. |
| Fact discovery and questioning | 2 to 10 months after prosecution, or even more than 14 months 2. | There is no pre-trial discovery, and in very few cases the court implements evidence preservation within a few weeks. |
| Claim Interpretation Stage | Markman Hearing (Markman Hearing) is usually held 5 to 14 months after prosecution 2. | Usually conducted simultaneously with the substantive hearing of the court and not as an independent and time-consuming preliminary proceeding 13. |
| Litigation to Trial Cycle | It usually takes 18 to 24 months to move to a formal trial 2. | The first instance is usually completed within 1.5 to 3 years, and 70% of cases can be concluded within 12 months 14. |
| Proportion of going to trial | Extremely low. Due to high costs and high predictability, less than 3% of patent cases go to final trial 2. | The vast majority of cases will advance to the court investigation and court debate stages and ultimately to a verdict. |
4. Conflict between electronic evidence compliance and data sovereignty: PIPL and survival rules under the Blocking Act
In today's increasingly fragmented geopolitical and technological compliance context, the highly expansionary extraterritorial discovery orders of U.S. courts and the solid data sovereignty legal system that China has built in recent years have collided head-on in cross-border patent litigation. This structural conflict in the legal system puts transnational entities under the jurisdiction of both countries into an extremely dangerous compliance trap: obeying U.S. courts means potentially violating the criminal and administrative bottom line of Chinese law, while complying with Chinese law may incur devastating contempt sanctions from U.S. courts.
Legal red lines for data security and personal information protection in China
China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) and Data Security Law (DSL) have come into effect one after another, setting extremely strict physical and procedural thresholds for cross-border data transfers. When responding to U.S. lawsuits, the defendants will inevitably need to extract emails, computer hard drive data, and communication records of Chinese employees, and these data will inevitably be deeply tied to "personal information."
According to the clear provisions of Article 39 of PIPL, when a personal information processor provides personal information outside the People's Republic of China, it must inform the individual of the name, contact information, purpose and method of processing of the overseas recipient, and more importantly, it must obtain the individual's "Separate Consent"15. Not only that, Article 38 of PIPL also requires that before data is exported abroad, it must meet security requirements such as a security assessment organized by the national cybersecurity and informatization department, obtain protection certification, or enter into a standard contract with an overseas recipient15. For Chinese companies, requiring employees to voluntarily sign "individual consent" when facing US litigation investigations often faces huge internal conflicts and legal interpretation costs.
However, the legal obstacles that are more blocking at the international legal level are Article 41 of PIPL and Article 36 of DSL. These two articles clearly delineate the boundaries of national judicial sovereignty and explicitly prohibit organizations and individuals in China from providing data and personal information stored in China to any "foreign judicial or law enforcement agencies" without the express approval of the competent authorities of the People's Republic of China (such as the Ministry of Justice and the Cyberspace Administration of China). 15
Cadence case and the judicial game of extraterritorial jurisdiction
This legal conflict was vividly demonstrated in the landmark US patent litigation case *Cadence Design Systems, Inc. v. Syntronic AB et al.* (2022)15. In this case, the plaintiff Cadence Company of the United States requested the Chinese defendant Syntronic Beijing Company to provide multiple computers involved in the case located in China during the evidence discovery stage to examine whether unauthorised EDA software was used. The defendants used China's data laws as a shield to resist resolutely, arguing that these computers contained employees' personal information. Without obtaining the "individual consent" required by employees' PIPL Article 39 and without the approval of the Chinese competent authorities to leave the country, transferring the physical computers or their mirror data to the U.S. court would constitute a serious violation of Chinese law. The defendant therefore proposed to only allow the plaintiff to travel to China to conduct on-site inspection of the computer 15 .
However, this legal attack and defence subsequently evolved into a fierce interpretation battle over the provisions of PIPL between Chinese law expert witnesses hired by both parties. The plaintiff's expert witness cleverly found a legal breaking point - invoking the immunity clause of Article 13, Item 3 of PIPL. The clause provides for an exemption from the requirement to obtain an individual's consent when the processing of personal information is "necessary for the performance of a statutory duty or statutory obligation". The plaintiff’s expert witness argued that the “statutory obligation” in this clause should be interpreted in an expanded manner, not only limited to China’s domestic law, but should also cover the international law obligation to obey discovery orders lawfully issued by foreign courts, and further argued that this statutory exemption is sufficient to overcome the separate consent requirement of Article 39 of PIPL15. Although the defendant’s experts retorted that the various chapters of PIPL were independent requirements and could not be confused, the U.S. federal court ultimately accepted the plaintiff’s claim, rejected the defendant’s Chinese law compliance defense, and strongly ruled that the defendant must submit relevant equipment and data to the United States. 15
The judgment in this case sent an extremely dangerous signal, highlighting the consistently tough and arrogant stance of the U.S. courts in the face of the Foreign Blocking Statutes (Blocking Statutes). U.S. courts usually make superficial analysis based on the principle of international comity (Comity), but its core logic is: since a foreign defendant chooses or actually conducts commercial activities in the U.S. market and therefore accepts the personal jurisdiction of U.S. courts, it must unconditionally bear the obligation to comply with the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Foreign data protection laws must not become an absolute safe haven to evade the obligation to fully discover evidence. 6
The application dilemma and substitution dilemma of the Hague Evidence Convention
From the official position of the Ministry of Justice of China (MOJ), the submission of domestic litigation data to foreign courts essentially falls under the severe category of “international judicial assistance”15. Chinese officials strongly recommend and require companies involved in litigation to strictly follow the established bilateral channels of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China and the Convention on the Acquisition of Civil or Commercial Evidence from Abroad (Hague Evidence Collection Convention) to apply for data export approval15.
However, in the cruel reality of practice, U.S. plaintiffs and even U.S. court judges are extremely reluctant to request evidence discovery from China through the Hague Convention. Not only does this procedure need to go through layers of central competent authorities, and translation is extremely cumbersome, but what is even more fatal is that China made a clear reservation statement when it joined the Hague Convention, stating that China will not accept the extremely broad "Pre-trial discovery of documents" request in the common law system. 16 The inefficiency and extremely high rejection rate of this international treaty remedy channel, in turn, forces U.S. courts to bypass diplomatic channels and prefer to directly issue unilateral mandatory disclosure orders that ignore geographical boundaries to Chinese entities under their personal jurisdiction.
At the same time, in addition to privacy and general commercial data, the tentacles of China’s “Law on the Protection of State Secrets” are also widely present in foreign-related litigation. Especially for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or leading technology companies involved in core sensitive fields such as communications, information technology, banking, and energy, their regular underlying technical documents and financial data can easily be broadly defined as "state secrets" related to national economic security. 1 If such core data are turned over without screening during the discovery process in a U.S. lawsuit, the executives involved would face extremely serious criminal charges.
5. Risks of evidence penetration in trade secret protection orders and cross-border parallel litigation
In the cross-border two-way flow of data and evidence, not only do Chinese companies face the passive compliance risk of handing over domestic data, but when foreign companies or multinational entities try to reversely introduce sensitive litigation-related data obtained through U.S. judicial procedures into China for parallel litigation, they also face the severe test of triggering contempt of court sanctions at any time. In the discovery of evidence in patent litigation, because extremely sensitive intellectual property rights such as underlying source code, core chemical formulas, and wafer processing techniques are inevitably involved, U.S. courts generally issue extremely binding trade secret protection orders (Protective Orders), which strictly limit the level of personnel who have access to confidential evidence and the scope of use. Usually only "Outside Counsel retained specifically for this action" and independent experts are allowed to access the evidence. 17
In recent years, parallel lawsuits have frequently broken out between Chinese and American companies around the world around the same underlying technology (such as claiming patent infringement in the United States and simultaneously initiating trade secret theft lawsuits in China). In this highly interrelated strategic litigation group, the plaintiffs are extremely eager to apply the enemy’s internal technical documents unearthed under the United States’ extensive discovery system to parallel cases in China that have stalled due to a lack of evidence discovery mechanisms.
However, attempts to challenge the boundaries of a protection order will come at a heavy cost. In the famous case of *SIMO Holdings Inc. v. Hong Kong uCloudlink Network Technology*, the plaintiff SIMO's U.S. trial lawyers obtained four highly confidential internal technical documents of the defendant uCloudlink covered by a protective order while handling the patent infringement case in the Federal District Court of the Southern District of New York. Motivated by a coordinated global litigation strategy, the U.S. attorney shared the four confidential documents with Chinese attorneys representing SIMO's Chinese subsidiaries in parallel trade secret and patent litigation in China. 18 The plaintiff tried to argue that the Chinese lawyer was actually a "special consultant" hired to provide cross-border intellectual property coordination strategies, which complied with the personnel immunity clause of the protection order. However, Rakoff, the famous American judge in charge of the case, ruthlessly refuted and sanctioned it. The court found this to be an egregious violation of the protection order and imposed a severe cash fine of up to $40,000 on SIMO ($10,000 for each protected document disclosed)18.
This case has sounded a deafening alarm for all transnational parties: even in related litigation under the same controller and a highly unified global IP rights protection battle, the geographical and case exclusivity barriers of the U.S. court’s evidence protection order are absolute red lines that cannot be crossed. Any attempt to export confidential information obtained through U.S. compulsory discovery to other jurisdictions, including China, without the express and specific written permission of the issuing U.S. court will be subject to extremely serious contempt of court sanctions. 18 In addition, as the United States tightens regulations on "Third Party Litigation Financing (TPLF)", U.S. national security agencies are increasingly wary of foreign-backed capital or lawyers acting as conduits to use the discovery process in U.S. patent litigation to legally steal trade secrets from U.S. companies and flow them back to foreign governments or competitors (risk of economic espionage). This has further led to U.S. courts adopting an unprecedentedly hostile and closed attitude when approving protection order exemptions and transnational lawyers' access rights. 20
6. Jurisdictional conflict over evidentiary privilege immunity: The invalidation and reconstruction of attorney-client privilege in China
The evidence privilege (Privilege) mechanism and the litigation hold (Litigation Hold) obligation constitute the last two buffer valves that maintain the U.S. adversarial judicial machine from swallowing up the normal operating system of enterprises. However, due to the long-term lack of corresponding underlying institutional structures in the Chinese legal system, Chinese companies often suffer irreparable litigation damage due to serious cognitive gaps when dealing with these two core procedural systems derived from British and American law.
The collision of attorney-client privilege in Chinese and American jurisdictions
The attorney-client privilege in the U.S. legal system absolutely protects private communications between a client and his attorney for the purpose of “seeking legal advice” from compulsory discovery by an opponent 21 . This privilege system is designed to encourage clients to confess all the facts of the case to their lawyers without fear that these confessions will be used as evidence in court. However, in the context of Chinese law and the framework of positive law, there is no concept of attorney-client privilege in a strict sense that applies to civil and commercial disputes. Although China's Criminal Procedure Law and Lawyers Law have given defence lawyers the obligation to maintain confidentiality in criminal proceedings, the subject of such confidentiality rights belongs to the lawyers rather than the clients themselves; more fatally, in civil or administrative proceedings, Chinese legislation does not explicitly grant lawyers the legal privilege to refuse to testify in court. On the contrary, according to Article 70 of the Civil Procedure Law, all persons who know the facts of the case (including lawyers in principle) have an inescapable statutory obligation to testify in court. 22
This grand level of legal vacuum is often infinitely amplified in foreign-related evidence discovery procedures initiated by the United States, leading to fatal leaks of core technologies or business strategies. When determining whether a legal communication email that occurs in a transnational context is exempt from privilege protection, U.S. federal courts usually adopt a complex "Touch Base" conflict of law analysis framework. 22 If the relevant communications occur at the company's Chinese headquarters and mainly involve Chinese nationals, Chinese corporate structures, and compliance analysis of local legal affairs in China, U.S. courts will often apply Chinese law based on the principles of private international law. In cases such as *Wultz v. Bank of China Ltd.* (S.D.N.Y. 2013\) which have a very exemplary effect, the US courts have systematically rejected China’s defence based on privilege. The court clearly ruled: Since Chinese law should be applied in the contact point analysis, and Chinese law objectively does not recognize attorney-client privilege (and there is no written provision with the same blocking effect as Korean law), these compliance investigation reports or internal technology risk-avoidance communications generated by the Chinese headquarters must be fully disclosed to the plaintiff without reservation22.
A more fatal systemic blind spot lies in the legal characterization of “in-house counsel”. In order to save budget, many large Chinese technology companies rely heavily on legal department employees who are not qualified to practice law to lead early intellectual property strategic layout, patent infringement free-to-operate analysis (FTO) and competitor avoidance design discussions. In the patent case of *Shenzhen Kinwong Electronic Co.* (S.D. Fla. 2019\), the U.S. court ruthlessly exposed this chronic problem and pointed out that under the Chinese legal system, in-house legal personnel are not equivalent to lawyers who are officially licensed to practice independently. Therefore, any emails exchanged between the Chinese company’s internal legal affairs and the company’s technical executives, circumvention design drafts, and technical vulnerability analysis do not have the basis for subject qualifications to trigger US privilege protection, and must all be submitted to the plaintiff as evidence22. This means that traces of technical discussions held by Chinese companies in internal conference rooms about competitors’ patents, once they enter the U.S. litigation track, will most likely become irrefutable evidence for the other party’s lawyers to accuse them of constituting “willful infringement” and trigger triple punitive damages and full legal fees.
Litigation retention obligations and the deep trap of destroying evidence (Spoliation)
When an enterprise reasonably foresees (Reasonable Anticipation) that it will soon be involved in an intellectual property dispute in the United States, its top legal decision-makers must immediately trigger the company-wide "Litigation Hold" mechanism, urgently suspend all routine data cleaning and destruction policies, and take reasonable steps to preserve all electronically stored information (ESI) that may be relevant to the claim or defence of the case. 8 If a company fails to properly implement its retention obligations, resulting in the loss of evidence, and the data cannot be recovered through other means, Article 37(e) of the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure authorizes the presiding judge to impose appalling sanctions of destruction of evidence (Spoliation). Once the court determines that a party has subjective malice (Intent to Deprive) to deprive the other party of access to evidence, the court can even directly issue an extremely adverse presumption instruction (Adverse Inference) to the jury - forcing the jury to infer that the destroyed and irrecoverable evidence is absolutely detrimental to the destroying party8.
In practice, U.S. courts have set a fine line between routine data cleaning mechanisms and malicious evidence destruction. For example, in the case *Lokai Holdings LLC v. Twin Tiger USA LLC*, the defendant's defence for failing to provide relevant emails was that the storage space provided by its email service provider was extremely limited, resulting in the system having to perform "daily routine" cleaning passively. Since the plaintiff could not prove that the defendant had selectively deleted the case for a specific case, the court ultimately did not find that it constituted malice in depriving evidence, thereby escaping the harshest sanctions. 26 However, in the *Ronnie Van Zant* lawsuit, the defendant replaced the mobile phone with a new one after the lawsuit was initiated and "selectively" omitted key text message records that were highly relevant to the plaintiff's dispute when backing up old data. This highly targeted selective preservation behaviour was immediately accurately captured by the court and judged to be malicious, and it decisively issued severe sanctions with an adverse presumption 26.
For Chinese companies, the biggest risk lies in the lagging behind of China’s highly popular mobile commercial office ecosystem and compliance concepts. A large number of corporate executives and core R&D engineers in China are accustomed to using personal WeChat, DingTalk or personal email to handle extremely sensitive technical cooperation negotiations and source code transmission. These decentralized communication platforms usually lack enterprise-level data mirroring backup capabilities, and personal mobile devices often face data erasure caused by replacement, loss, or insufficient storage space1. If after receiving a formal complaint from a U.S. court, or even just a Cease-and-Desist Letter, Chinese corporate executives fail to immediately stop regularly clearing WeChat chat records, or fail to centrally collect the work communication records of core R&D personnel, there is a high probability that the U.S. court will regard them as destroying evidence. In contrast, China's domestic litigation lacks a mechanism to force defendants to disclose internal documents, and parties have almost never developed the muscle memory to systematically preserve massive internal underlying communication data before litigation. This structural lack of compliance awareness often becomes an invisible killer that leads to the collapse of Chinese companies' litigation in the United States. 1
7. Court Ascertainment of Technical Facts: Expert Witness Confrontation and Technical Investigator’s Authority System
The core focus of patent litigation cases will inevitably end up on the ascertainment of highly complex and obscure technical facts. When entering the decisive substantive review stage of a court trial, China and the United States strive to bridge the limitations of judges’ technical cognitive abilities caused by their own legal background through completely different expert assistance ecosystems and judicial cross-examination mechanisms.
Expert Witness Confrontation and Cross-Examination System in the United States
The U.S. patent trial process mainly gives the right to narrate technical facts and lead the argument to expert witnesses (Expert Witnesses) hired by both the plaintiff and the defendant at a huge expense. In matters such as claim construction, multi-step or equivalent infringement determination, patent validity demonstration based on prior art, and legal and economic modeling and calculation of damages, expert witnesses play a key role in proving the final word 28 .
Due to the deep-rooted adversarial model of litigation in the United States, American judges and juries usually settle for the passive position of neutral hearers. The court mainly acts as a "gatekeeper" by applying the landmark Daubert rule (based on the threshold test standard set by Article 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which is to comprehensively examine the four core pillars of whether the scientific theory or method used by the expert can be empirically tested, whether it has been reviewed by authoritative peers, whether the potential error rate is controllable, and whether the method is generally accepted in the relevant technical community) to strictly control pseudoscience or unreliable expert opinions from being mixed into the evidence pool. 28
In the heat of the trial, even if the expert's written report passes Daubert's challenge, he must face extremely harsh, sharp and even personally aggressive cross-examination (Cross-Examination) by the other party's senior litigation lawyers when he testifies. 30 In the U.S. patent trial strategy, the most effective way to destroy the opponent's expert testimony is often not through pure technical debate, but to spare no effort to dig out the contradictory statements left by the expert in his decades-long testimonial experience, unnoticed theoretical loopholes in his early academic papers, and even dig out potential traces of money transfer between him and the retainer that are enough to affect neutrality, trying to completely destroy his academic credibility as an independent scientist in front of the jury 29. For Chinese companies involved in cross-border litigation, due to language and cultural barriers, finding expert witnesses who can defend extremely fluently in English, are well versed in the psychological tactics of cross-examination in American trials, and have an internationally recognized reputation in related cutting-edge technology fields is not only an extremely high explicit sunk cost, but their testimonial performance directly determines the final fate of cases that often cost hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. 30
China’s “technical investigator + expert assistant + appraiser” authority verification system
Given that China does not have a civilian jury system for patent trials, and most of the presiding judges have a pure legal background, in order to ensure the objectivity, neutrality and efficiency of the ascertainment of highly complex technical facts, the Chinese judicial system has built a unique "trinity" multi-technology ascertainment mechanism through continuous reference and localized innovation 33 .
1. Technical Investigators: Since China’s historic establishment of three specialized intellectual property courts in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou at the end of 2014, the technical investigators system has rapidly emerged as the most iconic judicial structural innovation in China’s patent trials 33. These technical investigators, who are formally incorporated into the judicial establishment system, are usually seconded by experienced officials from national patent examination agencies, backbones from top scientific research institutes, or scholars from higher education institutions. They serve as statutory trial assistants for judges and are deeply embedded in the entire process of case trials. Their legal duty is not to be partisan and endorse the hiring party like American expert witnesses, but to remain absolutely neutral. They assist judges in sorting out complex and obscure technical solutions, issue detailed internal technical review opinions to the collegial panel on infringement comparisons and the basis for invalidation declarations, and are even given the power to directly question both parties and their agents on core technical doubts during the investigation stage of the trial court. 33 According to the Supreme People's Court and official statistics, the comprehensive introduction of technical investigators has led to a historic jump in the accuracy of identification and settlement efficiency of highly difficult technical cases (for example, in the early days of the introduction of this system, the settlement rate of technical cases in the Beijing Intellectual Property Court surged by 85%) 33. However, its characterization at the level of evidence jurisprudence is extremely special - technical investigation opinions are essentially technical references within the court, and whether they can ultimately be adopted as a basis for judgment rests completely independently in the hands of the presiding judge. They will not be subject to tit-for-tat cross-examination as legal evidence disclosed to all parties in the trial, as is the case with expert testimony in the United States. 35
2. Expert Assistants: Within the framework of the Chinese Civil Procedure Law, this is called the “appearance of persons with specialized knowledge in court”. The parties may hire expert assistants on their own to provide special explanations on specific professional and technical issues during the trial investigation stage with the permission of the court. Its most core litigation function is to represent the parties and conduct highly targeted professional inquiries and logical refutations of the technical appraisal opinions and complex technical documents issued by the other party 34. Although the appearance of an expert assistant in court is inevitably confrontational and serves the unilateral interests of the parties, the statutory evidentiary effect of his or her opinions in court is usually unable to shake the conclusion of an independent judicial appraisal that is a state power.
3. Appraisers and Appraisers: When the underlying logic of the technology involved in the patent litigation is extremely complex, the technical claims of the plaintiff and the defendant are diametrically opposed, and the judge is still unable to form a conviction with the assistance of a technical investigator, Chinese courts often, in accordance with statutory authority or upon the application of one party, formally entrust an independent third-party appraisal agency with statutory judicial appraisal qualifications to conduct a substantive review and issue a "Forensic Appraiser Opinion". inherent in China
In the authoritative judicial practice ecosystem, conclusions issued by nationally recognized appraisal institutions often have extremely high probative effect that is almost decisive.
Through this set of clear-level, judge-led collaborative mechanisms, China’s patent litigation system attempts to maximize the absolute neutrality and scientificity of technical fact finding while effectively controlling the monetary cost and time cycle of litigation for parties. Compared with the explosive "mercenary-style" extreme game between expert witnesses in the U.S. federal court, the trial in the China Intellectual Property Court, at the level of revealing technical facts, is more of a power-finding process in which the presiding judge, with the professional assistance of technical investigators, conducts detailed questioning and exploration of objective scientific facts.
| Core identification elements | Scientific mechanism of US litigation courts | Comprehensive system of Chinese intellectual property courts |
|---|---|---|
| Power Dominance | Following the adversarial system, expert witnesses hired unilaterally by the parties and paying high fees completely dominate the presentation of technical opinions 32. | Following the authority doctrine, neutral technical investigators and third-party forensic appraisal institutions independently appointed by the court take the lead 33. |
| Opinion Admission and Review | Need to withstand the extremely stringent Daubert rule threshold challenge and undergo extreme cross-examination without blind spots in court 28. | The opinion of the official appraisal prevails; the technical investigator issues an undisclosed internal opinion for the judge’s reference, and the judge retains the final decision-making power 35. |
| Confrontation and Destruction Intensity | The intensity is extremely high, and the core strategic goal of cross-examination is to comprehensively destroy the academic credibility, neutrality and logical framework of the other party’s expert witness 31. | The debate was relatively calm and restrained, with the parties’ expert assistants providing limited clarifications, explanations and written rebuttals on doubtful points in the technical documents. 34 |
8. Patent validity challenges and procedural coordination: tactical application of hybrid examination and dual-track system
When responding to accusations of patent infringement, raising validity (invalidation) challenges against the patents involved in the lawsuit that the plaintiff relies on is a disruptive defence method in global patent litigation. However, there are extremely significant structural differences between China and the United States in handling invalid evidence review procedures and their coordination mechanisms with infringement litigation procedures.
Hybrid Patent Examination Jurisdiction Path in the United States
The U.S. patent rights protection system provides defendants with a highly three-dimensional countermeasures framework with "hybrid" relief channels. The U.S. Federal District Court not only has the exclusive jurisdiction to hear infringement disputes, but also has the jurisdiction to directly conduct substantive examination of the validity of the patent based on the defendant's application and even declare invalidity in court. In the same litigation proceeding, the defendant can raise the defensive defence of non-infringement and the active counterclaim of patent invalidity at the same time in a smooth manner, and the court will combine the trials at the same time and finally make a blanket ruling4.
In addition, since the enactment of the epoch-making America Invents Act (AIA), the U.S. Legislature has opened up a second and even more deadly front for defendants: defendants can directly file administrative challenge procedures such as Inter Partes Review (IPR) or Post-grant Review (PGR) with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) under the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) 36 . These administrative procedures, which are faster and less expensive than protracted court proceedings, provide defendants with a highly lethal weapon for invalidating “junk patents” on a large scale. At the same time, if the case involves an infringing import investigation initiated by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) based on Section 337 of the U.S. Tariff Act, the ITC, as an administrative law enforcement agency, can also make ancillary judgments on the validity of the patent based on expedited procedures 4 . This parallel configuration of "double or even triple firepower" among multiple departments gives American defendants a strong sense of flexibility and oppression in the organization of invalid evidence and the strategic use of multi-threaded tactics.
China’s dual-track process and judicial relief in 2025
Compared with the integration of jurisdictions in the United States, China implements an absolute "bifurcated system" similar to the German model on the issue of patent validity. Under this system design, patent infringement disputes (private rights remedies) are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the people's courts at all levels, while patent validity challenges (administrative authorisation validity determination) must be filed exclusively with the National Intellectual Property Office (CNIPA), which has national administrative attributes. The courts have absolutely no authority to directly hear infringement lawsuits and declare the patents involved in the case invalid. 4
This dual-track system of strict separation has led to an extremely common procedural blockage phenomenon in China's patent litigation practice: after responding to the lawsuit, the defendant will almost certainly file a request for invalidation with CNIPA, and use this as a legal reason to apply to the presiding court to suspend the hearing of the infringement case pending the outcome of the administrative review. According to judicial empirical data from 2024 to 2025, parallel administrative invalidation procedures and subsequent administrative confirmation litigation will usually extend the average trial period of China's patent infringement cases, which are known for their efficiency, by 4 to 10 months. 14
In order to fundamentally solve the procedural delays and litigant litigation caused by the dual-track system, the "Judicial Interpretation of Patent Infringement (III) (Draft for Comments)" issued by the Supreme People's Court of China in December 2025 has made highly operational and targeted system optimizations. Articles 5 and 6 of the Interpretation set up rigidly binding evidence rules: if CNIPA has made an administrative decision declaring the specific patent claims involved in the case invalid before the end of the second-instance court debate, the court should no longer wait rigidly for the lengthy follow-up appeal process to be exhausted, but should allow the patentee to decisively change the basis of the claim on which it claims infringement; at the same time, this rule imposes strict disclosure obligations on the patentee - it must bear real-time and proactive disclosure responsibilities to the court about changes in the effectiveness of its patent rights during administrative procedures. Any patentee who conceals important invalidity evidence or refuses to disclose the circumstances of the change in validity to the court without justifiable reasons will be severely prosecuted for adverse litigation consequences, and may even be directly characterized as constituting extremely egregious Dishonest Litigation 5 . The decisive revision of this cutting-edge evidence rule profoundly reflects the firm rule of law orientation of China's highest judicial authority, which is sparing no effort to bridge the efficiency losses caused by the dual-track system of administration and justice, and to use strong judicial supervision to force parties to abide by the principle of good faith.
9. Core analysis of China’s latest judicial policies and evolution of litigation rules in 2025-2026
The in-depth evolution of intellectual property judicial rules is always closely linked to a sovereign country’s rising position in the global science and technology industry chain and its national strategic transformation. Since 2025, the Supreme People's Court of China has issued a series of judicial interpretation drafts intensively and dozens of adjudication points summarized in the "Annual Report on Legal Application of Intellectual Property Cases in National Courts (2025)", showing clear judicial strategic intentions to comprehensively tighten the abuse of procedural litigation rights, maximize the protection of patentees, and create a preferred place for international intellectual property dispute resolution 5.
An in-depth analysis of the "Judicial Interpretation of Patent Infringement (III) (Draft for Comments)" which was released to the public for opinions on December 20, 2025 (31 articles in full, which is a systematic refinement of the adjudication rules of the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme People's Court from 2019 to 2024). 5. Multinational enterprises must be highly alert to the following major rule shifts that will completely subvert the existing litigation strategy:
1. Strengthen the abuse mechanism of jurisdictional objections and clear procedural roadblocks: The long-standing practical chaos is that after receiving the court's complaint for filing a case, the defendant will almost certainly raise jurisdictional objections out of delaying tactics, and artificially freeze the progress of the substantive trial of the case through lengthy first-instance jurisdiction and appeal procedures, in exchange for tactical dividends of transferring assets, transferring evidence, or winning a time window for invalidation. In response to this chronic problem, the draft for comments clearly uses the first three regulations to set up a strict firewall. The new regulations clearly state that the court will directly refuse to conduct substantive review of objections raised by the defendant for reasons that do not constitute substantive infringement or other jurisdictional requirements. A more subversive procedural breakthrough lies in Article 2, which formally empowers and allows the first-instance court to not passively suspend the case before the second-instance court makes a final ruling on the jurisdictional objection. Instead, it can organize the parties to exchange evidence and convene a pre-trial conference in advance to fix the focus of the dispute (only a final substantive judgment may not be made) 5 . This powerful system design is equivalent to completely depriving the defendant of the tactical arbitrage space at the discovery stage of the case by using the jurisdictional objection abuse mechanism to "freeze" the case at the source of the procedure.
2. Strengthen and extend the review radius of the "estoppel" rule across jurisdictions: The existing collection of Chinese jurisprudence and the latest judicial interpretation guidance have once again reiterated and expanded the application depth of the "Prosecution History Estoppel (PHE)". The application of this rule is no longer limited to domestic invalidity examination or patent office response procedures. In cases such as Dyson Technology Limited v. Suzhou Suzhou Generator Co., Ltd. In guiding cases such as Su-Vac), the Supreme Court clearly ruled that if the patentee is in other overseas jurisdictions (such as defence examination documents or amendments to the same family of patents submitted to the U.S. Federal Patent Office or the Taiwan Intellectual Property Bureau), in order to overcome the The Chinese examiner was forced to make a clear restrictive declaration of the scope of protection due to existing technical obstacles raised by the Chinese examiner. The examination history files of these declarations may also be introduced by the Chinese defendant and used in the infringement determination of the Chinese court to limit the scope of equivalent protection of the patent involved, thereby claiming estoppel. 5. This evidence identification trend with long-arm jurisdiction ruthlessly cuts off the way for multinational patent holders to try to "play the wind" in Chinese and American courts and issue contradictory technical explanations to defraud broader protection. It forces multinational companies to maintain an unprecedented high degree of logical unity in their global multi-jurisdictional patent family applications and various litigation strategies.
3. Introduce a punitive delay payment system for those who refuse to stop infringement: In view of the stubborn problem that a large number of small and medium-sized defendants continue to sell infringing products through vest companies or hidden channels after losing the lawsuit and being issued an injunction to stop infringement, Article 29 of the consultation draft provides
The court's extremely deterrent enforcement tool - for the losing party that violates non-monetary payment obligations such as cessation of infringement, the court can directly order a punitive delay payment calculated on a daily, monthly basis, or even based on the number of units of infringing products manufactured, based on the serious circumstances of the case, or directly issue a one-time high-amount fine11. This marks that China's judicial organs are armed with unprecedentedly strong "teeth" in terms of the penetration of judgment execution and the extension of the effectiveness of evidence.
10. Conclusion and practical suggestions for bilateral strategic coordination of multinational enterprises
The institutional differences between the United States and China in the field of patent litigation evidence rules are definitely not just technical collisions and local frictions between the two litigation philosophies of common law and civil law. It is also two completely different judicial values, different understandings of the boundaries of innovation protection, and even the direct and specific projection of national data security concerns by major powers. At the expense of extreme evidence transparency, the American system attempts to get closer to the truth of the case through ruthless confrontational comprehensive pre-trial disclosure and devastating cross-examination of expert witnesses. However, this heavy model inevitably pushes the financial costs of rights protection and defence for innovative subjects to staggering levels; The Chinese system, on the other hand, always takes into account judicial efficiency and substantive fairness under the macro guidance, relying on a strict front-loaded burden of proof to prevent abuse of prosecution, and through the judge's absolute leadership in ascertaining the authority and the neutral professional assistance of technical investigators, it has opened up a relatively fast and more predictable relief channel for the rights holder. In the evolution of judicial interpretations in the past two years, the objectively existing gap in evidence collection capabilities between parties has been continuously bridged through sophisticated dynamic transfer mechanisms of the burden of proof.
Under the macroscopic shadow of deepening global technological decoupling and normalized economic and trade frictions, patent litigation has long gone beyond mere disputes over commercial interests or technology patents. When the extremely expansionary global extraterritorial jurisdiction of the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure violently collides with China’s increasingly strict and uncompromising defenses of the Personal Information Protection Law and the Data Security Law, the collision of evidence discovery rules has inevitably evolved into a hidden international battlefield between the jurisdictional sovereignty of major powers and the sovereignty of core data. For market participants who are deeply integrated into the global technology R&D and supply chain ecology, thoroughly understanding and complying with the completely different underlying operating logic of these two systems is no longer a matter of simple compliance skills, but a top-level defence proposition related to the survival of enterprises in the digital economy era. Based on this, this report puts forward the following practical coordination suggestions:
First, resolutely build a "firewall"-style data isolation structure and foreign-related document retention policy. In view of the fatal requirement of destruction of evidence (Spoliation) sanctions in U.S. lawsuits and the severe red line of blocking data export under China's "Data Security Law", multinational companies must immediately implement extremely strict geographical and system physical isolation in their IT information architecture and global daily operations. For core technology source codes, top-secret technical drawings, and state-owned enterprise commercial contracts involving state secrets developed in China, it is necessary to ensure that the physical location and logical access rights of their storage servers are within China. Without review by China's legal procedures and obtaining clear approval from the responsible national authorities, overseas parent companies, foreign executives and their hired U.S. external legal teams must not have unlimited remote data retrieval and download permissions1. At the same time, companies must use iron-fisted compliance measures to completely eliminate the habit of core technology R&D employees using personal WeChat and private emails for key business communications. All these communication traces must be migrated to an enterprise-level secure communication platform that is subject to comprehensive technical monitoring by the enterprise and has a complete cloud mirror backup function to ensure that when faced with sudden US litigation, the enterprise can easily and accurately strip away personal privacy data and commercial litigation evidence, thereby not only formally meeting the compliance retention requirements of the US court to avoid contempt of court, but also being able to strictly guard against touching the red line of PIPL.
Second, comprehensively reshape the global legal cooperation structure to prevent core privileges from leaking into the abyss. Given that internal legal written communications in China hardly enjoy any "privilege" protection barrier that can be exempted when faced with radar detection outside the United States, multinational companies should quickly establish a standardized workflow for "privilege contact pre-emption and isolation." When conducting design around and free-to-operate review (FTO) analysis of key technologies with extremely high commercial value or potential U.S.-related litigation risks, companies must not rely solely on internal email exchanges from domestic non-qualified legal counsel in China. Instead, they must formally lead communications and issue opinions as soon as possible through an external U.S. licensed lawyer (Outside Counsel) who is formally hired and bound by extremely strict lawyer ethics in the U.S. All critical reports involving infringement risk assessments should be sent directly and only to external lawyers, and the privileged nature of obtaining "Seeking Legal Advice" should be marked prominently in the document. It is important to avoid unfavorable written conclusions in black and white in a closed loop without lawyer intervention between Chinese business line technical executives and non-licensed in-house legal counsel22.
Third, be proficient in and make the most of the differences in rules between China and the United States to carry out asymmetric litigation strategic strikes. Transnational patentees can make full use of the huge time difference in evidence mechanisms between China and the United States, the difference in proof costs and the blind spots in privilege determination to carry out global counterattacks. When acting as the offending party, the rights holder can first quickly file a case in Chinese courts to initiate litigation, and make full use of the increasingly strengthened delayed performance penalty and burden-of-proof (obstruction) systems in the new version of the "Judicial Interpretation of Patent Infringement (3)" to form a comprehensive injunction (Injunction) to the defendant under a high-pressure situation with a very short trial period. 5; At the same time, a series of lawsuits were launched simultaneously in the United States, and the deep-sea evidence discovery mechanism of the United States was ruthlessly used to force Chinese competitors into an unsolvable prisoner's dilemma from both financial and psychological levels - that is, they must either face sky-high e-Discovery review Compromise between processing costs and loss of trade secrets, or the bottom line of "illegal data export" that may trigger serious criminal liability in the country, can be used as a strategic pivot to quickly leverage and obtain extremely high patent settlement considerations or cross-licensing agreements covering the global market. On the contrary, when Chinese companies, as the beleaguered defenders, are attacked by two fronts of litigation, they must abandon the mentality of going it alone and rely on top local trial lawyers to apply to the U.S. court as soon as possible for a legal review of the international official evidence collection route of the Hague Convention. They should also proactively and frequently submit to the U.S. court the opinions of top Chinese legal experts on the absolute blocking effect of the Data Security Act. (Refer to the prototype of the defendant's defence in the Cadence case), and use all judicial procedures and international justice means to strive to minimize the coverage of the other party's evidence collection probes, or strive to strictly limit the evidence collection locations of core sensitive technologies to controlled security facilities in China to conduct non-replicable on-site reviews. 15.
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