China has a huge number of national standards for many industries. They provide practical implementation guidelines or technical instructions on how to comply with Chinese regulations and play a significant supporting role in China’s legal framework. However, industry has always complained about the difficulty of accessing Chinese national standards and the lack of effort from Chinese government in fostering transparency and facilitating access to this vital information. Industry has highlighted the time wasted searching for the right national standards and the negative impact on business. On Mar 16th 2017, Chinese Standardization Administration (SAC) launched an online database of national standards and allows users to search and read Chinese national standards for free.
The database includes all 3470 compulsory national standards (GBs). 2321 of them are copyrighted solely by the competent authorities, so they can be both read online and downloaded from the system. The other 1149 items can only be read online because they are adopted international standards such as ISO and IEC. The database also includes 6112 recommended national standards (GB/Ts). 3037 of them can be read online and the other 2075 cannot due to copyright protection.
There are still many recommended national standards that haven’t been included in the database. According to SAC’s timeline, the remaining GB/Ts will be included by the end of 2017. All newly developed national standards will be uploaded to the database within 20 working days of the publication. National standards relating to food safety, environmental protection and engineering construction are not included in the database.
