$249m worth of products seized as quality inspection teams raid factories

BEIJING - Tight supervision and severe penalties have been used to rein in exports of counterfeits and inferior goods, China's top quality watchdog said on Friday.

A nationwide crackdown on fakes that ran from last October to June this year saw 4,330 batches of poor-quality products seized, with a total market value of $249 million, according to official data released at a news conference.

Inspection teams targeted six major categories of goods, including toys, clothes, furniture, bags and suitcases, said Yan Fengmin, director of law enforcement for the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

Special focus was put on a few export distribution hubs, including Guangzhou in Guangdong province, Yiwu in Zhejiang province and Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

To address the outstanding problems, authorities have conducted routine on-site checks to get a clear picture of manufacturers' real production capacities and to curb exporters' attempts to evade inspections or use fake quarantine approval certificates, he said.

On May 12, inspection teams and police in Shenzhen, Guangdong, targeted an illegal cell phone factory and found pirated products worth 3.7 million yuan ($570,000), including 1,377 fakes modeled on Apple, Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones.

Wang Xin, director of the administration's inspection supervision, said the nine-month crackdown on counterfeits and inferior goods had effectively promoted the image of Chinese exports.

He cited the strict checks at Chinese ports for industrial exports to Africa, which since last October had helped stop 242 shipments of fake or poor-quality goods worth $16.3 million.

Authorities have also run thorough inspections of 257 Chinese firms that appeared on a blacklist for Egypt's Ministry of Industry and Foreign Trade for allegedly using forged pre-shipment quarantine inspection certificates, and have handed heavy penalties to confirmed offenders.

Huang Xingjun, who manages a factory in Handan, Hebei province, that sells clothes to German clients, said quarantine inspections have steadily strengthened over the past few years. "Every year there are some new test items and an expanding list of requirements," he said.

Yao Xinchao, a professor of international trade at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, said "made-in-China" products have long encountered tight scrutiny among importers in developed countries.

Chinese exports, he said, "generally have better quality than those sold in the domestic market because foreign importers require higher standards than those in China".

The recent escalator accident that killed a 13-year-old boy at a Beijing subway station showed that overall standards for product quality remain unsatisfactory in China, and government authorities should raise standards and strengthen efforts to conduct strict supervisions, Yao added.

China Daily

(China Daily 07/09/2011 page2)