What Chinese Trademarks Filed in the US Reveal About Brand Strategy — and Power — in 2025

Dec/31/2025

By the end of 2025, Chinese firms had filed 26 percent of all US trademark applications. Beyond sheer volume, the language embedded in these marks — and the provinces they originate from — offers insight into how Chinese companies position themselves globally amid trade tensions, industrial overcapacity, and intensifying geopolitical rivalry.

An analysis of Chinese trademark applications filed in the United States in 2025 shows a striking consistency in linguistic choices, blending global consumer appeal with subtle cultural signaling. The most frequent expressions—home, life, pro, beauty, hair, and tech—suggest a focus on lifestyle, personal care, and accessible innovation, while high-saturation terms such as pet, glow, fancy, and magic point to emotional branding over technical differentiation. Alongside these generic, market-friendly labels sit distinctive expressions rooted in Chinese language and culture. Words such as tang, tianma, mahjong, nanji, and xing appear with unusually high keyword saturation, indicating deliberate identity marking rather than coincidence. Together, these naming patterns reflect a dual ambition: to compete seamlessly on Western shelves while quietly anchoring brands in Chinese cultural provenance—an approach well suited to an economy whose trade surplus is projected to exceed $1 trillion in 2025 and whose industrial reach increasingly shapes global markets.

The geographic origins of these filings further underline how unevenly China’s trademark power is distributed. Guangdong province alone accounted for 36.5 percent of all Chinese trademarks filed in the US—equivalent to 9.5 percent of total US filings in 2025—cementing its role as the country’s primary export and branding engine. Zhejiang followed at a distance with 9.7 percent of Chinese filings, while Fujian contributed 7.9 percent. This regional concentration mirrors China’s broader manufacturing and export geography, where coastal provinces dominate scale, speed, and global orientation. As Washington delays new semiconductor tariffs until 2027 and attempts to stabilize relations with Beijing, these trademark flows offer a quieter signal of economic reality: Chinese firms are not retreating from the US market. Instead, they are refining how they present themselves—brand by brand, word by word—across borders that remain politically tense but commercially porous.