On 10 October 2021, the State Council published the Outline for the Development of National Standardisation, requiring all regions and departments to implement it. The Outline consists of nine chapters and 35 sections, and the full text is about 8,000 Chinese characters. To promote high-quality development and build a modern country in the new era, it is urgent to further strengthen standardization. This Outline is formulated to promote standardization development as a whole.

The Outline sets goals and blueprints for China’s standardization development in the next 15 years. Standards are the technical support for economic activities and social development and are closely related to people’s livelihood. In the future, standardization will be promoted in areas such as housing and property services, new energy vehicles, autonomous driving, platform economy and sharing economy.

SESEC make a quick analysis as below:

  1. National Standardization Development Outlineis issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council. This showed the great emphasis of this document.
  2. Stricter energy consumption requirements for key products and larger coverage of energy consumption standards to support the objectives of carbon peak and carbon neutrality.
  3. China will optimize the standard supply, not only by shortening the average development period of national standards to 18 months, but also by digitizing standardization. Standards can be used as data assets. Digitization of standards can improve the dissemination rate of standards and meet the requirements of data storage, scalability, and ease of use in the era of Internet big data.
  4. China will establish a national quality infrastructure system that integrates standards, measurement, certification and accreditation, and inspection and testing, to meet the needs of economic and social development.
  5. China tends to make the market-driven standards supply as same important as government-led standards. Association standards will have more development.
  6. Standardization will be endowed with more functions and roles in economy and society governance. E.g. Clause (18) “Promote the standardization of administrative management and social governance”is for first time introduced into this high profile document.
  7. International standards activity will be as same important and be invested with same resources and efforts as domestic ones. Currently, more resources like funding, technologies, and labour are for domestic standardization, and in the future, the China standardization will make even more efforts and resources on international standards adoptions and participation.
  8. More international standards will be adopted and converted. To ensure consistency of key technical indicators of national and international standards, by 2025, the conversion rate of international standards should reach 85%.
  9. Standards amount will be reduced, and the quality of standards will be improved. China also emphasizes standards implementation and evaluation, and will introduce standards implementation feedback system and “third party standards quality evaluation” Association standards will be evaluated and association SDO will be evaluated and even be accredited.
  10. Standards drafting in key technologies will still be enhanced, and this document made general targets and requirements for standards to support innovation like new technologies, and standards to support society governance like carbon emission and green development.

The English translation of this Outline is available here. And on 19 October 2021, State Council will have a Press Conference on the Q &A for this Outline, and it will be made open through Chinese media. SESEC then will make further analysis. Please stay tuned.