In July 2026, LV filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the Chinese tea chain Mixue (茉莉奶白), demanding 10 million yuan in damages over a four-petal floral pattern used on beverage packaging — a design LV claims is proprietary to its brand. The case ignited widespread public debate in China, not simply because of the hefty compensation claim, but because the four-petal floral motif, the monogram pattern, the checkerboard grid — these elements are pervasive across centuries of Chinese textiles, architecture, ceramics, and paper-cut folk art.
Commentator Shen Yi (沈逸), during a livestream discussion, identified LV as an "aggressive rights enforcer" among luxury brands, operating a global enforcement system that spans trademark registration, customs recordals, administrative oppositions, platform takedowns, legal letters, preliminary injunctions, civil litigation, criminal referrals, settlement agreements, and cross-border coordination. This resource-intensive model of rights enforcement itself functions as a barrier to entry — most small and medium enterprises and individual operators cannot mount a legal defense on equal footing.
When Western enterprises register public-domain symbols long established in non-Western cultures as exclusive trademarks, and then use the high barriers of the intellectual property system — expensive lawyers, complex procedures, selective enforcement — to "enforce their rights," does this model hold up in legal principle? Do the traditional cultural symbols of developing economies require a protection mechanism distinct from the current international IP regime?
Shen Yi's Four-Dimensional Framework
Dimension 1: A National Database of Traditional Patterns and Cultural Symbols
This is the most actionable recommendation. The database should cover: ancient artifacts, textiles, architectural ornamentation, folk customs, ethnic costumes, paper-cut art, embroidery, ceramics, woodcarving, religious symbols, local gazetteers, museum collections, and archaeological imagery.
The database would serve not merely a cultural exhibition function but a trademark examination and invalidation function, supporting opposition proceedings and court evidence submissions. If a symbol can be shown to have long existed in Chinese public cultural space before a multinational enterprise applied to register it, it should be blocked from becoming an exclusive mark of a single corporate entity.
Dimension 2: Incorporating Traditional Cultural Symbols into Trademark Examination Rules
Stricter examination standards should be applied to trademark applications involving traditional patterns, ethnic symbols, and public cultural elements, preventing enterprises from registering public-domain symbols as exclusive marks.
For marks already registered whose core components can be traced to traditional public cultural resources, corrective mechanisms should be triggered during enforcement.
Dimension 3: Counterbalancing Aggressive Enforcement Through Public Discourse
Shen Yi argues that enterprises pursuing excessive enforcement deploy significant legal resources to manufacture landmark cases, generating a so-called "chilling effect" — other businesses, fearing prohibitive litigation costs, abandon the use of traditional cultural elements even when those elements exist in the public domain as a matter of legal principle.
The counter-strategy is effective public discourse. Public attention and pressure from public opinion can, to a degree, check the "power expansion" achieved through legal means.
Dimension 4: Government Maintains a Balanced Stance
The government should not take sides but should sustain a healthy order — drawing a dynamic boundary between legitimate intellectual property protection and the prevention of excessive cultural appropriation.
"On the one hand, we must protect our traditional culture, protect our cultural symbols; on the other hand, we must protect legitimate commercial interests."
The Deeper Problem: Historical Injustice in the Current IP System
Shen Yi's analysis touches on a deeper question — the historical formation of the current intellectual property system.
During the colonial era and early globalization, Western enterprises and explorers collected vast numbers of cultural symbols from non-Western civilizations, and subsequently privatized these public-domain cultural elements through the trademark system. When the same enterprises then turn around and "enforce their rights" in non-Western markets through this system, they are effectively using a set of rules designed by the West to dispossess, for a second time, the non-Western countries from whom cultural symbols were historically taken.
This is not a "China exceptionalism" argument — similar disputes exist in India (the yoga trademark case), Australia (Aboriginal art patterns commercialized by fast-fashion brands), and elsewhere. It is an institutional challenge shared across the Global South.