How do professionals uphold core values while working inside state agencies with government mandates? Drawing on China's patent office during the rollout of the Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025) policy, a major national policy that pressured examiners to prioritize domestic strategic innovation, this study probes how values are maintained or bent in practice.

Using interviews with 27 examiners and archival analyses of 972,266 patents reviewed by 10,304 examiners (2012–2020), the authors uncover a hierarchy of professional values. Examiners see judgmental fairness as a core identity value and diagnosing diligence as a supporting operational value. Under MIC 2025 pressure, examiners sped up domestic strategic cases and narrowed prior art searches. They compromised diligence while insisting their judgments remained fair. Evidence shows that reduced diligence increased grant likelihood for domestic applications in strategic fields, subtly undermining fairness. Two professional interactions buffered the erosion of diligence. Benchmarking with foreign examiners made quality comparisons salient and encouraged fuller searches. Contending with experienced patent agents also raised the bar by demanding evidence-backed reasoning.

Management insight: In professionalized public institutions, pressure to favor strategic priorities often erodes supporting professional values first and later destabilizes core values like fairness. To protect integrity without stalling progress, leaders should enable cross-institutional benchmarking and encourage skilled adversarial review, and be cautious with minor compromises as they can unintentionally bias outcomes.”