The Annual Meetings of the Sino-German Working Group on Product Safety and Accreditation and Conformity Assessment in Beijing

The Annual Meetings of the Sino-German Working Group on Product Safety and the Sino-German Working Group on Accreditation and Conformity Assessment and their preceding technical workshops were held on 4th and 5th of November 2019 in Beijing, P.R. China. The Working Groups are part of the Sino-German Cooperation on Quality Infrastructure between the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) and the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) / the Certification and Accreditation Administration (CNCA) of the P.R. China.

In this year's annual meetings, the strategic and operational planning of the cooperation and the exchange on overarching quality infrastructure topics continued. In addition, the milestones of the cooperation until now and new priority topics for future cooperation were discussed.

In his opening remarks, deputy director general Helge Engelhard (VI, Digital and Innovation Policy, BMWi) once again emphasized the extremely successful cooperation with China. He underlined the significant success of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding this year between BMWi and SAMR, which serves as the basis for further cooperation following the ministerial restructuring in 2018.

In addition, accompanying technical workshops were held, which also took place in Beijing and were followed with great interest, especially by industry representatives. Topics of the workshops and seminars included market surveillance in online retail, vehicle certification and recall procedures in the automotive industry. The participants were thus also able to conduct a technical discourse on the topics of product safety, market surveillance as well as on certification and accreditation.

The annual meetings take place annually in either Germany or China. The next annual meeting will be held in Germany and is expected to take place in Bonn in 2020.