From February 13 to March 12, 2025, SAMR (State Administration for Market Regulation) opened a public consultation on the Guidelines for Building a Standards System for Standard Digitalization (Draft for Comments).
China has already outlined the requirements for the digital transformation of standards in top-level policy documents such as the National Standardization Development Outline and the Quality Power Construction Outline. Subsequently, the Action Plan for Implementing the National Standardization Development Outline (2024–2025), jointly issued by SAMR and 17 other departments, provided more detailed guidance, including the goal to “actively advance research on digital standards and build a standards system framework for it.” Against this backdrop, China established the National Standard Digitalization Working Group (SAC/SWG29) and proposed the framework for the digital standardization system. After multiple rounds of discussion and revision, the Guidelines for Building a Standards System for Standard Digitalization (Draft for Comments) were developed.
The document presents China’s reference architecture for standard digitalization, basic principles, development goals, and planning, aiming to guide the future development of China’s digital standardization work.
In terms of reference architecture, the document describes the processes, capability levels, and application objects involved in standard digitalization activities from three dimensions: lifecycle, capability characteristics, and application levels. This is intended to clarify the standardization objects and scope of standard digitalization activities.
Regarding basic principles, the document emphasizes principles such as strengthening cross-departmental, cross-level, cross-industry, and cross-domain collaboration, being demand-oriented, driving the transformation of key technologies for digital standardization into standards, and enhancing international exchange and cooperation.
In terms of development goals, the document outlines that by 2025, no fewer than 20 national standards related to standard digitalization will be revised or newly formulated. The focus will be on accelerating the development of standards for digitalization terminology definitions, basic principles and methods, structures and data formats, semantic expression and transformation, intelligent reasoning and interaction, content creation and storage, and content processing and handling.
As for the development plan, the document presents the following framework.
Currently, the international consensus and rules regarding standard digitalization are still in the formation stage, and a systematic digital standardization system and related standards have yet to be fully established. By introducing a standard digitalization development framework and actively guiding and promoting standard formulation, China aims to enhance its first-mover advantage in this field and shape its influence in future international standards. This document reflects China’s development plan for standard digitalization standards in the near future, and European standardization organizations are encouraged to actively provide feedback.
The full text of the document (in Chinese) can be downloaded from the following link:
https://www.samr.gov.cn/hd/zjdc/art/2025/art_f58fd9d1c3f943bbade9c66269a009cc.html
