The Ministry of Education ("MOE") has recently issued the Administrative Provisions on the Use of the Language of Information Technology Products (Draft for Comment) (the "Draft for Comment") for public consultation by July 6, 2020.
According to the Draft for Comment, language information processing software products should make sure their information-technology-based language processing conforms to the standards, norms and provisions concerning Chinese language information processing published by the state, including "the standards, norms and provisions relating to Chinese ideogram coded character set". The Draft for Comment further stipulates that relevant entities or institutions are encouraged to provide a function that warns users about typos and other linguistic phenomenon, while designing and developing the language information processing software products featuring language input/output, editing, proofreading, etc. The Draft for Comment also proposes that where a language information processing product is found to breach the requirements set out in Article 4 hereof and thus considered substandard in terms of product quality in product quality inspections, the department performing such inspections shall deal with the case pursuant to the provisions of Article 17 of the Product Quality Law; other violations, if any, shall be handled by the relevant administrative authorities in accordance with the provisions of Article 49 of the Product Quality Law.