China Seeks Comments on Draft Standardization Law Amendment

On March 22, the State Council Legislative Affairs Office (SCLAO)published the long awaited China Standardization Law (Draft for Comments) on its official website for public comments, with a deadline of April 21. These revisions, once passed, will be the first amendments to the China Standardization Law since it went into effect in 1989.

There are several highlights of this draft, including:

• Expand standards scope: from the current focus of the law on industrial products and engineering to the inclusion of standards on services and social management (Article 2)
• Streamline mandatory standards development (Article 9):
  • limit the scope of mandatory standards to human health, life and property security, national security, ecological and environmental safety, and other basic technical and management requirements 
  • grant SAC only the right to approve and publish mandatory standards
• Optimize recommended standards system: classify industry and local standards as recommended standards; eliminate all industry- and local-level mandatory standards (Article 11, 12)
• Officially grant legal status to social group standards: allow legally-established social groups to make social group standards for voluntary adoption by the market (Article 13)
• Complete enterprise standards regulations:
  • encourage enterprise standards to set higher requirements than national, industry and local standards (Article 14)
  • replace file-for-records requirements on enterprise product standards with enterprise product or service standards self-disclosure system (Article 24)
• Establish a State Council-level mechanism for standardization coordination and promotion (Article 5)

USITO has shared a draft English translation with members and is in the process of collecting member comments.