In December of 2016, China's Supreme People's Court handed Michael Jordan a win, nearly a decade after he first went looking for one. The headlines afterward mostly said some version of "Jordan wins trademark battle in China," and left it there. What actually happened is more interesting, and more useful if you're the kind of person who thinks carefully about names, because Jordan didn't win his name back. He won half of it, and the half he lost is the more surprising half.
Qiaodan Sports Co., Ltd. was incorporated on June 28, 2000, in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, and it built its entire brand identity around 乔丹 (qiao dan), the standard way Chinese speakers transliterate "Jordan." Say it out loud and it sounds essentially identical to the English name. The company didn't stop at the basic transliteration. Over the years it registered more than seventy separate trademarks tied to the name, covering the Chinese characters, the romanized pinyin spelling, his old jersey number 23, and even the Chinese transliteration of his son Jeffrey's name, 杰佛里.
Here's the detail that trips up almost every foreign brand or public figure who runs into this problem: China operates on a first-to-file trademark system, not first-to-use. It doesn't matter who was famous first, or who used a name first in the real world. What matters, legally, is who filed the registration paperwork first. Qiaodan Sports filed years before Jordan's legal team ever formally objected, and by the early 2010s the company had grown into a real retail force, thousands of stores and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
In November 2011, Qiaodan Sports filed a draft prospectus with Chinese securities regulators, aiming to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and raise roughly 1.1 billion yuan, about 150 million US dollars. The filing passed its initial review that same month. Jordan filed suit in 2012, right as the IPO was moving forward, and the timing was not incidental, his legal team specifically wanted to block the listing before it locked in Qiaodan Sports' use of the name even further. It worked, at least in the sense that the IPO stalled indefinitely under the weight of the litigation. Qiaodan Sports actually countersued Jordan in 2013, arguing he was improperly interfering with their business by holding up their stock listing.
The early rulings did not go Jordan's way. Both the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board and two separate Beijing courts sided with Qiaodan Sports, and their reasoning is worth sitting with, because it's not unreasonable on its face: "Jordan" is described in the original ruling as an ordinary American surname, not a full name, and the courts found the existing evidence insufficient to prove that "Qiaodan" pointed specifically and exclusively to Michael Jordan the basketball player. Millions of people in the world are named Jordan. Why should one company be barred from using an ordinary surname in Chinese just because one especially famous person also has it? What followed was one of the longest, messiest trademark battles in recent Chinese legal history, more than eighty separate claims and counterclaims stretched across years of litigation.
The Supreme People's Court's December 2016 decision finally gave Jordan a real win, but a narrow, specific one. The court agreed that Michael Jordan holds personal name rights over the Chinese characters 乔丹 (qiao dan) themselves. The reasoning was that this particular written form had become so strongly and specifically tied to him in the public's mind that using it commercially without his consent violated his rights as an actual, identifiable person.
But the court refused to extend that same protection to the romanized version, the Latin letters "QIAODAN." This is the part that surprises people, including plenty of trademark lawyers outside China. Spoken aloud, "乔丹" and "QIAODAN" are the exact same sound. Any Chinese speaker hearing either one would think of the same word. But the court treated them as two separate legal objects, reasoning that the connection between the Latin-letter spelling and Michael Jordan specifically was harder to prove, since pinyin spellings show up constantly for reasons that have nothing to do with any particular celebrity.
This is the detail that makes the case worth studying closely, not just reading about. Most people, understandably, assume a name is a name: once it's legally protected, it's protected everywhere it shows up. Chinese law doesn't work that way, and honestly, once you understand how the language itself works, it makes a strange kind of sense.
Chinese exists simultaneously in multiple writing systems for the same spoken sound. Characters carry centuries of accumulated cultural and visual association, they're read, recognized, and remembered as distinct symbols, not just sounds. Pinyin, by contrast, is a comparatively young phonetic tool, developed mainly for teaching, typing, and search convenience. It doesn't carry the same weight of specific cultural association. So when a Chinese court draws a hard line between 乔丹 and QIAODAN, they're not being pedantic, they're recognizing that these two representations of the same sound genuinely function differently in the minds of Chinese readers, and therefore can reasonably carry different legal protections.
Here's the part most casual coverage of this case leaves out. The December 2016 ruling settled the character-versus-pinyin question, but it didn't finish the fight. Jordan had also filed a separate civil suit in Shanghai seeking damages for personal name infringement, roughly 50 million yuan, about 7.9 million US dollars, and that case dragged on for years alongside the trademark cancellation proceedings. In December 2020, the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People's Court ruled again in Jordan's favor, this time ordering Qiaodan Sports to formally apologize, stop using "Qiaodan" as its company tradename entirely, and stop using Qiaodan-related trademarks going forward. That same year, China's Supreme People's Court also revoked a fourth Qiaodan trademark, the combined name-and-logo mark, on the grounds that the name itself was misleading to consumers, even though the accompanying silhouette logo was ruled too vague to count as a violation of Jordan's specific likeness. By the time it was finally resolved, this had stretched into an eight-year legal war fought across multiple courts and multiple separate cases.
So did Michael Jordan win? Eventually, yes, more completely than the initial 2016 headlines suggested, but it took years longer and many more courtrooms than most people realize. He got the Chinese-character version of his name back in 2016, and by 2020 had also forced the company to stop using the tradename altogether and pried loose several more of its trademarks. It still wasn't instant or clean. It was a slow, grinding, linguistically specific victory won one narrow ruling at a time.
If there's one lesson worth taking from this, it's that protecting a name in China is never a single action. You need to think about the Chinese characters, the pinyin spelling, and realistically, any other phonetic variation people are likely to use, because Chinese courts may protect one of those forms and not the others, even when they're pronounced identically. Jordan's decade-long fight is proof that even the most famous name in the world isn't automatically safe just because everyone already knows who you are.