The excess claim fees in China, namely, official fees required when there are more than 10 claims in one application, are calculated based on the actual number of the original claims, and only charged for once when filing an application. The calculation manner of the excess claim fees is RMB 150 (around USD 21) per claim in excess of 10.

Therefore, for one PCT application entering into Chinese national stage, there is no way to reduce the excess claim fees by reducing the number of the claims since it is calculated based on the number of the original PCT claims.

However, for one divisional application, which must be filed with a claim set, if the Applicant wants to avoid the excess claim fees and/or if the claim set could not be well confirmed and prepared when filing this divisional application, we would like to suggest the Applicant filing a divisional application with any 10 or less claims, such as the first 10 original claims of the parent application, and then amend the claims into those the Applicant actually wants to protect by voluntary amendments during the following two windows:

1. when requesting the substantive examination; and
2. within three months after receipt of the Notification of Entry into Substantive Examination Stage.

In addition, please note that, for the above strategy for avoiding excess claims fee, we cannot guarantee this option is available for each and every single Chinese Examiner.  Few Examiners may believe this option is not reasonable and then issue a Notification to require applicants to make a supplementary payment for those later-filed extra claims.  But till now, we did not receive such kind of notification.  Therefore, we think such strategy is worth trying, especially for the biological and chemical applications, some of which may contain more than 100 claims.