Before You Leave: How China’s Courts Have Changed the Definition of Trade Secret Theft — And What This Means for Foreign Companies
For many years, the common belief about protecting trade secrets—both in China and internationally—was straightforward: if an employee copies confidential information but neither shares it with a competitor nor uses it, at worst they have broken company rules but not committed a legal offense. The logic was that without sharing, no information leaks; without use, no competitive harm occurs; and without harm, the law has no grounds to act. As a result, many employers who found that a departing engineer had copied source code onto a personal device often dismissed it, retrieved the device, and moved on. Likewise, many employees thought that as long as the copied files stayed on their private drives, they were operating in a legal gray area at most. That intuitive approach has now officially ended. In 2024, China’s Supreme People’s Court Intellectual Property Tribunal issued a landmark appellate ruling (case number (2023) Zui Gao Fa
