Recently, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council have issued the Guiding Opinions on Launching the Quality Improvement Program (the "Opinions").
The Opinions set forth an objective of dramatically enhancing the quality of products, projects and services, further increasing contributions of the quality to boosting the total factor productivity and facilitating the economic development, and forming a batch of world-level industrial clusters with top quality and benefits, by the year 2020. To achieve this end, the Opinions lay down specific requirements from different perspectives, including "consolidating infrastructure for national quality" and "reforming and improving policies and systems on quality development". In addition, the Opinions specify the necessity of constructing a quality-based credit enhancement and financing regime to take the quality level, standards, brand value, etc. as the indicators for enterprise credit ratings and as the reference factors for loans granted to enterprises, promoting product quality insurance through greater efforts to support enterprises to boost their product quality and promote and apply new products through insurance approaches, and undertaking research into amendments to the Product Quality Law and other legislative work regarding the quality management in service sectors, guarantee for product quality and recall of defective products.