For foreign applicants navigating patent litigation or invalidation in China, a common frustration is hindsight bias. Too often, CNIPA or lower courts strip down a patent into isolated technical features, find those features across disparate prior art references, and declare the invention to be “obvious”. To counter such hindsight reasoning, the core criterion has always been whether a person skilled in the art would readily conceive of such technical solution. In practice, that standard has not been applied consistently. Examiners and judges are often tempted to rely on their own intuitive standard, or worse-yet, directly use hindsight reasoning, undermining the consistency and predictability of the inventive-step analysis. A relatively recent…