13-06-2019
On 5 June, SAMR released the Notice on Releasing “Guidelines for Random Inspection on Association Standards” and the “Guidelines for Random Inspection on Enterprise Standards”. The notice is aimed at randomly inspecting the conformity of association and enterprise standards to the Standardization Law. The objects to be spot-checked are the association and enterprise standards that have made self-declaration and made public on the National Association Standard Information Platform and the Enterprise Standard Information Public Service Platform.
The inspection items include,
- If the technical requirements of these standards are lower than that in mandatory national standards
- If the contents of these standards are technologically advanced and economically reasonable (if covered by the product categories that will be eliminated according to the latest version of the Guiding Catalogue for Industrial Structure Adjustment)
- If the numbering of these standards complies with relevant requirements in the Administrative Measures for Association Standards or the Administrative Measures for Enterprise Standardization
- If the function indexes and performance indexes of enterprise standards are disclosed
Due to its enormous quantity and rapid growth, China’s association and enterprise standards have always been questioned in terms of quality and management. Random inspection would be a good way to address the problem. However, its coverage is limited, and the large amount of resources which would need to be invested to tackle various technical and operational difficulties in the process would make the costs prohibitive. It is therefore suggested that more social supervision should be adopted. Only the participation of the whole society can solve the problem fundamentally.