Core Trademarks Such as " ZXMOTO" Confirmed, Brand Identity Returns to Founder

On October 29, the Chongqing Intellectual Property Office disclosed that a batch of core trademarks, including "ZXMOTO," has completed registration, with trademark rights belonging to Chongqing Zhang Xue Motorcycle Industry Co., Ltd. Following multiple rounds of trademark opposition proceedings, the "Zhang Xue Motorcycle" brand identity has formally been placed, at the legal level, under the name of the corporate entity controlled by the founder.

From the perspective of trademark law practice, this case is a typical example of a prior-use brand facing cross-class malicious preemptive registration and securing confirmation of rights through trademark opposition proceedings. Public information shows that Chongqing Zhang Xue Motorcycle Industry Co., Ltd. was established in April 2024. Within just half a month of its establishment, the company filed a trademark application for "Zhang Xue Motorcycle" in Class 12 for transport vehicles (motorcycles). The filing date preceded the brand's official public launch by five months, reflecting the brand owner's proactive prior layout of trademarks in the core class. After the brand subsequently gained market traction and achieved recognition in racing events, multiple market entities in Wuxi and Foshan successively applied to register trademarks related to "Zhang Xue Motorcycle" in upstream and downstream non-core goods/services classes such as lubricants, racing vehicle rental, and metal locks, intending to occupy the brand's upstream and downstream tracks. This constitutes malicious preemptive registration under trademark law—filing applications without intent to use, for the purpose of preemptively registering another's prior brand identity.

Pursuant to the currently effective provisions of the Trademark Law of the People's Republic of China (2019 Amendment), including Articles 4, 32, and 44, the core element in determining malicious preemptive registration does not lie in whether the trademark application class differs from the core goods, but rather in whether the preempting party knew that the mark already possessed a certain degree of reputation, lacked genuine intent to use, and filed the application for the purpose of profiting or obstructing another's brand layout. In this case, the rights holder filed trademark oppositions against the preemptively registered trademarks. The preempting entities failed to respond in the opposition proceedings, and the China National Intellectual Property Administration, upon examination, refused to approve registration of the relevant preemptively filed trademarks. Meanwhile, the rights holder's own core trademarks successively passed examination, were published, and completed registration. With the support of intellectual property public services at the municipal and district/county levels, the rights holder ultimately completed this round of trademark rights confirmation.

It should be noted that trademark registration operates under a class-based protection system; registering a trademark in only one class does not automatically confer all-class protection. The core class for motorcycle enterprises is Class 12 for complete vehicles, while lubricants, repair services, helmets, and peripheral accessories fall under different goods and services classifications. Many emerging brands tend to register only their primary business class while neglecting upstream and downstream related classes—a gap that malicious preemptive registrants are most inclined to exploit. Zhang Xue Motorcycle has subsequently filed more than one hundred additional trademark applications, covering related classes such as complete vehicles, maintenance consumables, repair services, and advertising. It has also utilized the Madrid international registration system to lay out overseas trademarks, filing applications simultaneously in regions including the European Union, Japan, and the Philippines to preemptively defend against overseas trademark squatting, simplify the management costs of multi-country trademarks, and improve its brand trademark protection layout—offering strong industry reference value.