Abstract:    Under new situations and circumstances, how to strengthen the protection and use of intellectual property rights is a significant problem for China. Actually, the system of intellectual property protection in China is relatively perfect, thus the key point is the implementation of laws and regulations. For the patent protection, the patent administrative protection is an important element. How do we strengthen the patent administrative protection effectively? The protection and use of intellectual property rights has attracted considerable attention, both scholarly and popular, however, most studies of intellectual property rights have not dealt with the patent administrative protection in depth and ignored the characteristics of patent management system and mechanism in China. From the perspective of the strategic interaction between provincial regions in the patent administrative protection in China, this study set out to figure a possible way out to improve the patent protection.
   Based on the provincial panel data of China from 2002 to 2016, using the General Spatial Econometric Model (SARAR), this paper tried to identify the type of strategic interaction between regions in patent administrative protection, and study whether and how inter-regional patent administrative protection affects each other in the context of Chinese style decentralization.
   The theoretical analysis shows that: (1) In the field of patent in China, the central government is mainly responsible for the patent management and provincial local governments are primarily in charge of the administrative enforcement of patent. This constitutes the basic framework of China′s patent administration management system. (2) Under the background of Chinese style decentralization, constrained by the flow of resources and driven by top-to-down economic and political pressures, local governments and local government officials have a strong incentive to promote the enforcement of patent administration protection. And, they learn from each other, thus forming "run-to-top" competition in the field of patent administration protection.
  The Hausman test shows that it should use the spatial panel model with fixed effects. Moreover, results of logL and AIC indicate that it should use the spatial panel model with both time fixed effects and individual fixed effects. Estimated results show that the coefficient of space lag term is 0.4642，it means that a provincial region will strengthen its patent administration protection when its adjacent regions improve their patent administration protection. That is statistical significance at the 99% level of confidence. In other words, there are indeed mutual imitations among local governments in the field of regional patent administrative protection, and the level of patent administrative protection between adjacent regions can promote each other. By replacing the indicator of the patent administrative protection, a robustness test was carried out in order to avoid measurement errors. And by replacing the regional population scale, the regional economic development, the regional technology import fee, the regional FDI and the regional import amount of goods with their one period lag terms respectively, the other robustness test was carried out to avoid the reverse causality effect. Both of test results show that the basic estimation results are robust.
    This study deepens the understanding of local government competition, and is also a supplement to the study of competition in the construction of local rule of law. At the same time, this study provides the knowledge base and policy support for the promotion of intellectual property protection and the implementation of the innovation driving path of high-quality economic development, and also provides a possible path for further promoting comprehensive rule of law.
   Therefore, in order to improve the actual level of intellectual property protection, and promote technological innovation as well as economic development, we can properly strengthen the formation mechanism of "run-to-top" in regional patent administrative protection, and enhance the level of local patent administrative protection.

Key words: patent administrative protection, strategic interaction, spatial panel model