China and Japan should promote healthy economic and trade relations by working together to ensure product quality and food safety, said Vice-Premier Wang Qishan in an article contributed to The Nikkei. Excerpts:
The Chinese government values product quality and food safety. It has already enacted 34 relevant laws and regulations, and established more than 20,000 national standards.
An oversight system covers production, distribution, retail as well as exports and imports.
As a result, the quality of Chinese industrial goods and the safety of Chinese food products have notably improved.
This maintenance of quality is in step with our rapid economic growth and social progress. As we meet the ever-rising demand of domestic and overseas markets, we are gaining recognition across a wide range of consumers both at home and abroad.
But, China is still a developing country in the process of industrializing. There is a significant disparity in the pace of economic development between urban and rural areas.
Technology and quality control levels are also uneven across Chinese companies. China still lags behind advanced countries in such areas as drafting new product-safety standards and revising existing ones quickly; ensuring cooperation among government agencies that oversee different industrial sectors; and adequately training inspectors and devising cutting-edge inspection methods.
China and Japan are important trading partners. Generally speaking, industrial and food products traded between the two sides are of high quality and safety standards.
More than 99 percent of Chinese and Japanese food exports bound for each other in 2007 passed each country's safety tests when their samples were subjected to such testing, according to Japan's Ministry of Health and China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
As bilateral economic ties steadily expand, some products exported by Japan and China to each other have recently raised quality and safety concerns.
But those items are only a minuscule portion of an ever-growing list of goods exported to each other, and in no way represent the standards of product quality and food safety of either country.
It is of great practical significance that cooperation on ensuring product quality and food safety has been put high on the agenda of the Second China-Japan High-Level Economic Dialogue to be held shortly.
Both countries should consider cooperating fully in this area from a long-term perspective, through this and other dialogues.
Participants in the upcoming meeting will discuss ways to promote various exchanges and to jointly devise effective quality control systems.
The Japanese government has extensive experience overseeing quality control and food safety practices at firms in general, and at midsize and small ones in particular. Our government will be able to learn much from its counterpart in this respect.
Beijing will seek to bolster its ability to ensure Chinese product quality and food safety by improving the existing mechanism to notify trading partners of potential problems quickly.
This will allow the government to improve its ability to swiftly respond to possible problems and solve them in time.
Let us enhance cooperation in ensuring product safety, with an emphasis on machinery, electronics, textiles, chemicals and farm produce.
It is a never-ending process to improve product quality and food safety in line with scientific advances and technological innovation.
I hope that both governments will step up cooperation in a forthright and businesslike manner, creating an environment conducive to steady growth in mutually beneficial economic and trade ties, thus bringing further benefits to citizens.
(China Daily June 10, 2009)