China has stepped up efforts to guard the intellectual property rights of the Olympic symbols and slogans in the past year with a special regulation promulgated by the State Council.

Achievements in this regard have been made with the efforts of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG), China Olympic Committee, the General Administration of Customs and the industrial and commerce departments, said Xu Yulin, deputy director of the Office of Legislative under the State Council.

Xu made the remarks yesterday at a seminar marking the first anniversary of the regulation, which falls today.

Xu urged relative authorities to continue to strictly punish those who illegally produce goods bearing Olympic symbols, especially after BOCOG releases the emblem for the 2008 Games in May, along with the market development plan.

Olympic symbols include the Olympic five-ring symbol and flag, names of formal Olympics-related issues and slogans of the 2008 Olympics such as "New Beijing, Great Olympics" and "Beijing 2008."

More than 130,000 goods with unauthorized Olympic symbols were confiscated by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Industry and Commerce last April, according to Li Dongsheng, deputy director of the State Administration of Industry and Commerce.

Some 112 advertising boards illegally using the slogan created for Beijing's 2008 Olympic bid, "New Beijing, Great Olympics," were ordered to be changed.

And customs officials around the country have intercepted about 30 shipments of goods for export illegally using the Olympic symbols over the past year, according to Wang Yongshui, an official with the General Administration of Customs.

Those illegal export goods involved clothing, sports goods, light industrial products and textile goods.

"Many manufacturers are just following orders from foreign clients to use Olympic symbols on goods," said Wang.

He noted it is difficult to balance protection of Olympics-related intellectual property rights with the interests of domestic manufacturing companies.

China is one of the few countries that have issued special regulations to protect Olympic slogans, said Yin Xintian, an official with the State Intellectual Property Office.

In another development, a six-day exhibition of designs for the National Stadium - the main stadium for the 2008 Games - closed yesterday in Beijing.

A plan proposed by a consortium of Switzerland's Herzog & de Meuron Architekten AG and the China Architecture Design & Research Group gained the most votes from a 10,000-member audience, after being highly-recommended by the Beijing Urban Planning Commission on the last weekend.

(China Daily April 1, 2003)