27/04/2020
On April 14, 2020, SAC released the Guiding Opinions on Further Strengthening the Administration of Industry Standards, signalling that China’s efforts to improve sector standardization and moving towards openness and transparency.
SESEC observations on the Guiding Opinions are as follows:
- National standards should be developed for cross-sector and cross-industry technical requirements according to relevant laws, regulations and policies.
In the past, there was no clear boundary between national standard and sector standard. Both national standards and sector standards were options for standardizing a technology, causing confusion among overseas stakeholders about these two kinds of standards. The integration of cross-sector and cross-industry technical requirements into national standards will make China’s standards system clearer and easier to manage. However, due to strict control on the scale of national standards, it is becoming more difficult to initiate a project.
- Making the drafting group of sector standards more representative and more professional. The scope of soliciting opinions for sector standards should be broad enough to cover as many stakeholders as possible. The transparency of the information about formulating and revising sector standards should be improved
In China, the development of sector standards is less open than that of national standards. It is particularly hard for stakeholders, especially those abroad, to get information about developing sector standards and join relevant standardization committees. The measures mentioned above can help to address these problems.
- Where a national standardization technical committee is already in place to meet the needs of the industry, in principle, no new technical committees for industry standardization in specialized fields will be added. Industry authorities are encouraged to entrust the national professional standardization technical committee with the work related to sector standards.
Deploying existing technical committees for national standards to develop sector standards is conducive to saving effort, being more efficient, disseminating information and achieving equitable participation.
- The sector standard filing mechanism should be improved to work effectively, ensuring that “everything is available”.
The sector standard filing mechanism is an important interface for overseas parties to understand the development of sector standards in China. The sector standards that have been filed through this mechanism in the past represent only a small percentage of the total number of sector standards. But now, the filing and disclosure of all sector standards will help ensure openness and transparency in industry standardization efforts
- From 2020 onwards, all newly released sector standard texts will be made public in accordance with the law.
The availability of information on sector standards is crucial in the transparency of standardization. However, considering that many overseas standards have been adopted and transformed into domestic sector standards, the disclosure of the full text of these standards will have a significant impact on the copyright protection of overseas standards
- Complete the clean-up of sector standard codes by the end of 2020 and publish legitimate sector standard codes.
At present, China’s sector standard codes are numerous and disorganized. Streamlining and integrating these codes will not only reduce the complexity of China’s sector standards system and improve the management efficiency of standardization work, but also help stakeholders to understand more accurately the updates of work related to sector standards in China.
The release of this document was endorsed by the Joint Inter-ministerial Conference on the Coordination and Promotion of Standardization under the State Council, which will facilitate related work. However, the implementation of these efforts will take a long time and the extent to which they will be implemented remains to be seen.
