China will push forward drafting more standards in social work to improve the quality of service, a senior official said on Friday.

Gu Zhaoxi, vice-minister of civil affairs, said that drafting more service standards will help improve the quality of services in the social work sector.

"The development of professional social work services would require a standard system to guide the effort," he said at the launching ceremony of the Chinese Society of Social Work on Friday.

Gu said he hopes the society's launch will help push forward research in standardization in the social work area and speed up drafting of standards of service.

Statistics by the Ministry of Civil Affairs show that the country had more than 400,000 certified social workers by the end of 2014, an increase of 29.1 percent from the previous year.

Wang Jinhua, head of the ministry's social work department, told the Economic Daily that social workers only took up 0.03 percent of the country's population, a ratio that is far behind western countries, where social workers typically took up 2 percent of the total population.