Standardization in China: Electric Vehicle Technology as Driver for Change in China's Automotive Standardization

Electric vehicle (EV) development in China emerged with the 863 program (1986) for high technologies and has received support since the 10th Five Year Plan. While standards were of no particular importance in the early years of EV development, standards have increasingly become subject to policies and programs. For instance, the promotion of ‘indigenous' or ‘home-grown' innovation is perceived as means to develop domestic standards and contribute to international standards. Alongside this target, the Chinese government mandated the development of an EV standardization roadmap to serve as a guideline for optimizing standardization work, promoting technical innovation and large-scale industrialization. It was even considered that EV standardization was a novel standard field that has the potential to secure China a forerunner position in technological development as well as international standardization, regardless of standard-setting practices in the conventional automotive sector. Against this background, this paper examines the differences in system set-up and processes of standardization for the traditional automotive and the electric vehicles sector. While conventional automotive standardization is limited to a single sector with the Ministry of Industry of Information Technology and the China Automotive Technology and Research Centre in charge, electric vehicles require the participation of stakeholders from other sectors. Therefore, the negative influence from the conventional decentralized automotive sector on the development of common nationwide standards like the dynamics between national, regional and local actors cannot be deprived. Additionally, this paper also highlights learnings from EV standardization that might set positive impulses for conventional EV standardizations.