12/02/2020

On 8th Jan 2020, SAC published a notice asking the relevant government departments, industry associations, and technical committees to recommend foreign investment enterprises’ participation cases of China’s standards development work. SAC claimed that,

  1. Reasons for collecting the FIEs’ participation cases of China’s standards development work:
  • To implement the relevant requirements of the “Foreign Investment Law of the People’s Republic of China” and “Regulations for the Implementation of the Foreign Investment Law of the People’s Republic of China”;
  • To promote the effective implementation of the “Guiding Opinions on Foreign Investment Enterprises’ Participation in China’s Standardization Work”;
  • To promote the participation of FIEs in China’s standardization work, and further improve the openness and transparency of China’s standardization work;
  • To improve the level of internationalization of China’s standards.

2. The information being collected by SAC includes:

  • Cases of foreign investment enterprises participating in the work of the national standardization technical committee;
  • Cases of foreign invested enterprises participating in the development or revision of national standards;
  • Cases of foreign invested enterprises promoting the usage of national standards, international standardization cooperation, and the internationalization of national standards.

SESEC Analysis

In recent years, foreign-invested enterprises in China have made many complaints about the openness of some Chinese technical committees. SAC tried to collect FIEs’ participation cases of China’s standards development work to check and respond to such complaints. At the same time, it is also a research and an investigation on the openness of the Chinese TCs. It seemed that SAC would like to collect good cases on FIEs’ participation. However, as there are totally 2000 TC/SC under SAC, different TC/SC may have different policies and practices. Even if some FIEs successfully joined some TCs in China, it is hard to reflect the true and comprehensive situation of FIE’ participation and if there is equal treatment.

SESEC is doing research on the opening of related Chinese TCs, and we are suggesting SAC to implement unified technical committee regulations in more than 2000 national TCs and SCs to increase the transparency of the standardization work. We are also trying to conduct a statistical analysis of the composition of all TC members, and understand the proportion of FIE members, state-owned company members and other members in each TC. We hope that it can promote China’s early realization of industry to be the main body of standard developing, rather than government or administrative forces to develop standards.