Comments to the Legislative Affairs Commission of National People's Congress on the Standardisation Law Revised Draft

2017-06-15 | Beijing, Shanghai

The European Chamber submitted consolidated comments to the Legislative Affairs Commission of National People's Congress on the Standardisation Law Revised Draft. The comments underlined the following aspects:

  1. In General, the Standardisation Law Revised Draft formulated is targeted to fully support China’s objective to improve the existing standardisation system to improve product quality and support the industrial upgrade across sectors. The scope of the Standardisation Law should be restricted to standardisation activities, and should not be extended to market access mechanisms or conformity assessment schemes. And the Law should act as the fundamental law for the formulation of standards, and no any other laws should conflict with it. In addition, this law should fully harmonise and align with other laws and regulations such as the Product Quality Law, and should neither contain overlapping requirements nor duplicating the punishments.

  2. Two major concerns from industry are social organisation standards and enterprise standards. The industry is concerned that the social organisation standards might be used as legal reference for the government procurement, industrial policy, certification and testing programmes. With regard to the self-declaration system of enterprise standards, the system will require enterprises to self-declare all product performance-related indicators, functional indicators, service indicators. The system will increase the costs of enterprises, and take the risks of IP rights for enterprises. Besides, the company will also face the labelling issues, such as standard number and name.