Safety of 3.6 million elevators a top priority: quality watchdog

China's quality watchdog is to monitor elevator malfunctions and assess risks to further enhance supervision and ensure safety, a senior official said.

Song Jihong, director of the special equipment bureau at the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said the authority has launched a one-year campaign targeting elevator safety and will try to establish a long-term mechanism to increase supervision.

"That also includes an emergency response platform that could reduce the rescue time of people trapped in elevators and a means to monitor malfunctions to reduce the failure rate," he said at an elevator safety event in Beijing.

Song said Shanghai and Beijing were the largest cities in the world in terms of number of elevators in service as of last year, making safety a pressing issue.

China had 3.6 million elevators in service by the end of 2014 and the number is increasing at a rate of 20 percent annually with the country's rapid urbanization.

The country recorded 48 accidents involving elevators last year and such accidents were responsible for the death of 36 people, according to the watchdog.

There were a number of problems that are still hampering the maintenance of elevators, including unclear responsible parties and untimely upgrading of facilities at residential buildings, the regulator said.