The General Office of the Ministry of Transport ("MOT") has recently released the Standards for Identifying Quality Highway and Waterway Projects (for Trial Implementation) (the "Standards"), and has also distributed a notice for this purpose.
The notice states that highway and waterway projects that are under construction, completed and handed over, or pass the acceptance inspections, could be engaged in the assessment program to identify the quality projects, regardless of their scale of construction and grade, as long as they are among those listed in the capital construction plans for national and local transportation. In particular, the assessment to select the demonstration quality project by the stage of construction shall be conducted after half of the total construction and installation budget has been used for the main part of a qualifying project and before the acceptance inspection is performed and the project is handed over. The Standards are classified into three types of standards, i.e. the standards for selecting demonstration quality projects by the stage of construction, standards for selecting demonstration quality projects by the stage of completion acceptance and handover, and standards for selecting demonstration quality rural highway (Class III and Class IV) projects, with each type of standards further comprised of four parts, including the basic requirements, assessment indicators, indicators for bonus points and overall assessment. Furthermore, the Standards expressly state that the basic requirements are the controlling gauge, implying that any project will not be eligible for the application for becoming a quality project if any of the given basic requirements is not fulfilled.