Lately, the State Administration of Work Safety("SAWS") has issued the 13th Five-Year Development Plan for Work Safety Standards (the "Plan").
The Plan states that by 2020, the framework of work safety standards will be much more comprehensive, with their coverage further expanded, and the number of standards to be newly designed and amended for some key sectors during the 13th Five-Year Plan period will see over 5 percent growth compared with the figure for the 12th Five-Year Plan period. To achieve this end, the Plan proposes six major tasks, including "strengthening preliminary study on work safety standards", calling for efforts to integrate and simplify the mandatory standards so as to strictly limit them to the extent of safeguarding personal health and ensuring the life and property safety. The Plan also requires that recommended standards should be optimized and improved, in a bid to cut the number and scale of existing recommended standards step by step. According to the Plan, 362 standards are expected to be formulated and revised during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, including 231 mandatory standards (comprising 93 national standards and 138 industrial standards) and 131 recommended standards (comprising 38 national standards and 93 industrial standards).