In January 2011, the CPSC established, in Beijing, its only foreign office. The Beijing Office has two professional staff members, a Regional Product Safety Officer (RPSO), and a locally hired Regional Product Safety Specialist (RPSS). The office operates within the U.S. Embassy structure. It is engaged primarily in education, information-sharing, and project-specific activities with public and private sector officials in Asia, who are involved in ensuring the safety of consumer products exported to the United States.
In recent years, the CPSC’s Beijing Office provided face-to-face briefings and training presentations to public- and private-sector officials in China, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam, who are engaged in product safety issues.
China remains the dominant exporter of consumer products to the United States. If trends from the past 10 years hold, China will continue to export more consumer products to the United States that fall under the CPSC’s jurisdiction than all other countries combined. In addition, manufacturing firms in China produce almost 90 percent of toys purchased in the United States, along with a large proportion of other children’s products, such as clothing, cribs, and nursery products.
The Beijing Office, therefore, focuses approximately two-thirds of its attention on China. The Beijing Office undertakes substantial efforts to boost the CPSC’s day-to-day interaction with Chinese government agencies involved in consumer product safety. Following a 2018 government reorganization, China created the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), a ministry-level agency with cross-cutting regulatory authority over a range of market-oriented functions, including product safety. SAMR assumed domestic-focused product safety functions formerly undertaken by the State Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). Import and export screening for product safety hazards now rests with the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC). Both SAMR and GACC are key partners for the CPSC Beijing Office’s work in China, which remains a top priority as Chinese goods continue to account for more than half of total CPSC-announced product recalls, and an even greater proportion of recalls of children’s products. This amplifies the importance of the Beijing Office’s work with SAMR and GACC, and their provincial and municipal branch offices.
Outside China, the Beijing Office has enabled the CPSC to expand significantly its education and outreach efforts in the East Asia and Pacific Region. Through in-person meetings, the Beijing Office helps advance important relationships and boost the agency’s education, outreach, and intergovernmental cooperation efforts in the region.
The Beijing Office will seek to boost the CPSC’s cooperation in future years with regulators, industry associations, and manufacturers, both inside and outside of China and the East Asia and Pacific Region.
CPSC staff Joel Blank and Liping Li meeting with members of the Toy Council of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, August 2018
Participating in opening ceremony before delivering a training at the hoverboard portion of the International Consumer Elect4onics expo, July 2018
Meeting with China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products (CCCME), June 2018
Hong Kong Toy Fair, January 2018