Open Standards Update: Standards Activity Review

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It is my great honour to be here, giving the presentation on Chinese ICT standardization system. Many thanks for the invitation from W3C, and especially to Mauro, who did a excellent job organizing this great session. Our previous speakers have given a very good speech, presenting the overview of Standardization system in China, and since both of them are from Government agencies, they have more authority to present this kind of topic. Here I just try to give my view from the industry perspective.

Standardization has been regarded as national strategy for the development of science and technology in China. According to a policy issued out by Ministry of Science and Technology in the year 2002, standardization was regarded as one of the strategic tools for national development in parallel with Patents and Human Resources. And then follows a big research program setting up National Standardization Strategy, sponsored by Chinese governement in the same year. After 3 years of research, the strategy was finished at the end of 2005. The project was focused on two main strategic standardization related issues in China, one is the market relevance of standardization, another is the international competitive ability and technical standard. The finding of the research is that “China will meet with obstruction on international market due to unsuitable standards. It is important to make Chinese standards market relevance and competitive.”

According to the research, there will be reformation of Chinese Standardization System. But so far, generally, there is only formal standardization system is running here in China, with limited consortia standardization activities. Chinese standardization is a centralized administrative system, combined with respective responsibility of official departments in specific industries administration. The whole system is Government Leading with Enterprise Participation. The standardization system is based on international standardization system, with the interests from local industry and regional concerns. With regards to the Standardization Law, there are four levels of Standards Categories with four levels of vertical Management Architecture.

National Standards are developed for technical requirements need to be unified national wide. There are about 300 Tcs and 4 Wgs. The Secretariats are distributed in different government related sectors. All the national standardization system are taken care of by Standardization Administration of China, as a branch of Administration for Quality Supervision Inspection & Quarantine (AQSIQ).

The second level is Industry Standards, which are developed only when National Standards are not available. About the ICT related standards, they were and still will be organized by the Ministry of Industry and Informatization, as the new ministry replacing the former Ministry of Information Industry, after this turn of Chinese government re-org. Industry standards could be delivered to SAC for approval as National Standards through the TC channel. But it should be paid more attention that, an industry standard still could be adopted or mandated by the industry authority.

Local Standards is there when Neither National Standards nor Industry Standards are available. They reflect unified requirements for Safety and Hygiene([haiJi:n]) of industrial products, when they are needed within a local area. The local standards are managed by Administrative Bureaus of Standardization in Province Level.

The lowest level is Enterprise Standards, which are within an enterprise when National Standards, Industry Standards and Local Standards aren't available. Enterprise Standards should only Put On Records to the local standardization administrative agency, and controlled by Administrative Bureaus of Standardization in City Level.

Chinese standardization system is deployed according to the standardization life cycle process, from requirement collection, standards development, standards test, certification, application and maintenance, generally from the view of standardization technical work and certification program.

This is a little complex diagram, showing the same complex standardization system in China. The red circle include SAC and MII. SAC is coordinating all the standardization policy and technical work in all industries, and MII, is focusing only on ICT standards. And the blue one, the Administration of Certification and Accreditation of China, hosting testing and conformance certification program in all industries. China National Institute of Standardization works for SAC in standardization policy setting, including part of ICT related standardization setting in the layer of application, e.g e-business standards. We just have heard the speech from Mr. Wang Ping as the CTO of CNIS. In addition to CNIS, most ICT related national and industry technical standards are developed under the management of MII. The technical standards are hosted by China Electronic Standardization Institute, China Electronic Standardization Association and China Communication Standardization Association. Meanwhile, as a ministry, MII hosted more than 20 standardization groups directly in the field of ICT. As the agency to represent China in the activity of ISO/IEC/JTC1, CESI take the responsibility to host the secretariat for JTC1 in China. And in order to organize all the standardization activities, National Information Technology Standardization Technical Committee, National Security Information Technology Standardization committee, and National e-Gov Standardization Working Group, etc. are set up, and hosted by CESI. Just as we see in the other part of the world, standardization systems are always complex, possible overlapping and power always matters. The other part of the diagram are related ministries, its standardization work, the status of being involved in international standardization bodies and trade organization.

If you have interests, here is a brief introduction of standardization related agencies in China.

China was involved in international standardization arena in a very early stage. It joined IEC as P members in 1957 and ISO in 1978, as P members as well. It has adopted lots of international standard as national standards. Among about 20K national standards, 9250 of which are adopted from
international and advanced overseas standards, with a rate of 44.2%. For all national standards, 6683 are adopted from ISO/IEC standards, 2567 standards from other international are organizations. But, there is limited ISO/IEC standards adopt Chinese technology. Among 20000 ISO/IEC standards,only 28 of them are based on Chinese proposals.

As I said before, consortia standardization activity is very limited in China, although we all know that in ICT industry, consortia standards is pretty critical, and it is consortia which set standards as the basis for the Internet. International consortia standardization start to operate in China in the passed 3 years, W3C, OASIS and even IEEE set up local office here. It is exactly a very good trend for Chinese ICT vendors and the international standardization consortia itself. Consortia standardization here not only help to promote the awareness of the value of standardization, but also help local industry to get rid of the suffering of standards lacking at the time that they have to use. Consortia standardization activities give them great opportunities to be involved in the advanced standards setting from the first stage, helping local vendors to get rid of the lock of proprietary technology, and help them to compete in the higher level as well. Consortia also benefit from the involvement of Chinese vendors. They can get more requirement input for better standards, and meanwhile find partners here to work together pursuing Chinese market place.

But in general, Chinese vendors is still very limited to take part in international consortia standardization. There is a neutral third party consultant company, 79 Brinkburn, in UK, was commissioned to do a study examining participation in the 50 dominant ICT consortia. About 55 companies in 3 continents and 11 countries were identified in the research. If you have interests, please download the Executive Summary of the report from this URL.

From the outcome of the research, Asian vendors are less than 25% in the whole participation, and North American companies are more than 50%.

From the country perspective, China is very limited in the whole participation, comparing with its contribution to the world economy.

I would like to use my last slide, as the recommendation to consortia, just like W3C, about how to operate well in China. Base on the presentation before, we know that the value of the standardization have not been known by the local vendors to the level it should be here. So, the first thing is that we should do is to promote the awareness of the value of standardization in the ICT industry. We should make great efforts to set up training programs, educating local vendor about how to participate and contribute in the consortia standardization. For a country like China as a centralized management, we will try to get the support from the government for the consortia standardization promotion, not only to promote that consortia standards being recognized in the government procurement, but also to work for a better policy environment for the operation of consortia standardization, since we know from Mr. Wang before that there is still a problem here that no legal basis for consortia, just like W3C to run in China. Meanwhile, it is the fact that Chinese ICT vendors are still in the low level of value chain in ICT industry, for a consortia full of more powerful vendors, it is suggested the efforts to encourage open process and open IPR as the rules in standardization, which will be much appreciated by the local vendors, since from the perspective of standardization, collaboration is much more critical rather than competition, power sharing is important as well with the membership expansion. Finally, it is believed that SMEs will always get benefits from standardization activities, since a level, fair and non-monopolized marketplace will better for them to innovate and compete. What we should do is try to touch with them with fair rules. But in China, SMEs always have limited resource to take part in the standardization activity. For a consortia, it is suggested that we should try to decrease the threshold, and to be more inclusive.

Thank you.