Hearst pulled the licence — the Chinese publisher kept printing Cosmopolitan anyway

Trends Group, founded in Beijing in 1993 by former travel journalists Liu Jiang and Wu Hong, built China's biggest fashion-magazine publisher by licensing Western titles: Esquire from 1996 and Cosmopolitan from 1998, run in China as 时尚先生Esquire and 时尚COSMO. On November 22, 2023, Hearst Magazines announced it was terminating both China licence agreements with immediate effect.

Trends Media Group said publicly that it had already stopped operating the Cosmopolitan and Esquire brand businesses since July 2022 and would respect Hearst's decision — but its publishing arm, Trends Publishing House (TPH), kept printing magazines and posting on social media under both names. A May 2025 arbitration ruling in the Netherlands found TPH had never actually been a party to the original licence agreements, undercutting its claim to any continued right to the names.

TPH did not comply with Hearst's cease-and-desist demand. On November 7, 2025, Hearst filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against TPH in China to enforce the termination; the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court accepted the case on November 10, 2025 — two years after the licence had already ended.