Why do Chinese universities hold many more patents than other universities?

Question

On the list of top 250 largest patent holders worldwide (2021), I see that Chinese universities hold many more patents than other universities, even normalizing by population size or student population size. Why? I am especially interested in the difference between China and the USA.

Universities ranked by number of active patent families* from the link above:

Rank	Name	# active patent families	Country
2	Chinese Academy of Sciences CAS	78,415	China
16	Tsinghua University	31,368	China
34	Zhejiang University ZJU	21,805	China
76	Zhejiang University of Technology ZJUT	11,053	China
109	Dalian University of Technology	7,932	China
112	National Research Council of Science and Technology	7,803	South Korea
119	Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics	7,373	China
124	China University of Mining and Technology CUMT	7,014	China
151	University of California	5,603	USA
157	Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS	5,370	France
218	Capital Medical University	3,739	China

---

*An active patent family is:

a collection of global patent filings related to a single invention. For example, if a company invents a new technology and files related patent applications in 10 countries, that represents one patent family. Further we only count patent families that are active – which contain at least one current, granted patent. This is a patent that can be enforced and that has not expired.

Answer 1

I suspect there are two main reasons.

1. There are substantial subsidies for patent applications in China
2. Chinese patents are generally of lower quality; thus it takes less work to file them, and there is a lower bar on what to patent.

Patent Subsidies

It costs a lot of money to file a patent application in the US. Meanwhile, in China, currently, there are monetary subsidies from various levels of government for filing patents.

Lei and colleagues wrote about this issue in 2013:

Other observers, however, believe that the patent boom is largely due to various patent subsidy policies implemented by local governments to meet and/or exceed the patenting targets specified by the government.³

They go on to note:

it’s likely that the increase in the number of applications is due to patentees broke up their patents to get more applications (and thus more subsidies).

Patent Quality

The other issue is patent quality. In my personal experience with university patent offices in the US, the professionals that work there are very interested in if your invention is of significant enough quality and commercial value before filing for a patent--after all, it costs a lot of money.

Because of the subsidies, universities in China may be less interested in patent quality. The bar is lower, allowing more patent applications.

Hefa and Zhenxing wrote about this in 2014 :

Based on the analysis above, it is discovered that of all the four aspects of patent quality, China falls behind in quality for invention, document quality, and quality for commercialization... The lagging behind quality for commercialization shows the reality that Chinese patents are less commercially valuable. The average royalty and license fee is significantly lower compared with developed countries.

In conclusion, there are subsidies from the Chinese government that incentivize more patent applications. Further, the quality of the resulting patents is lower.

The Chinese government seems to agree:

China plans to stop all patent subsidies by 2025 to help shift its intellectual property (IP) focus from quantity to quality.

Answer 2

My two cents:

• It is part of their performance metric. In other words, having patents count toward their promotion or continuation of their employment.
• Many academics own side businesses; there is a huge incentive to do so given their low salary. Hence, many seek to commercialize their research outputs.