Oct 01, 2006

Building on years of successful cooperation with standards organizations in China, Beijing will be the location of the 2006 fall meeting of the ASTM International Board of Directors.  The ASTM Board meetings, as well as other events, will take place in China’s capital city during the week of October 16, 2006.

The 23-member ASTM International Board of Directors is comprised of top industry and government executives with responsibilities in standardization, including the director of standards at IBM Corporation; the chief counsel for the Committee on Science of the U.S. House of Representatives; the CEO of the Swedish Standards Institute; the director of the U.S. Department of Defense Standardization Program; the director of toy safety for Fisher Price Toy Company, and others.

Special Guests
ASTM International is honored to have Mr. Liu Pingjun, Administrator of the Standards Administration of the People's Republic of China (SAC), address the ASTM Board at its opening session on Tuesday, October 17. 

David Sedney, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in China will be speaking at an opening reception hosted by ASTM International on Monday evening, October 16.

Events
Many standards-related events are scheduled to complement the Board meetings:

A roundtable discussion titled, “The Relevance of Standards to Regulations, Trade, and Market Access” will take place on October 18 from 2-4 p.m. at the St. Regis Hotel in Beijing. Co-hosted by the AmCham-China Standards Forum and ASTM International, this event is a forum for dialogue with the ASTM Chairman of the Board and the ASTM President. There is no fee to attend.

ASTM Board members and staff will visit Chinese industry associations and ministries representing various industry sectors in which ASTM standards are globally influential: construction, consumer products, medical devices, the environment, nuclear energy, metrology, petroleum, and aviation.  Morning and afternoon visits are arranged throughout the city for Beijing Day, anticipated to be an excellent opportunity for standards information exchange.

Similarly, ASTM Board members and ASTM staff will visit universities in the Beijing vicinity, including the Beijing University of Astronautics and Aeronautics, the Beijing Technology and Business University, and Tsinghua University.  These university visits reinforce ASTM’s academic outreach program, which offers free student membership.
 
Longstanding Relationships and Future Mutual Benefit
“China is the world’s third largest merchandise trader, and nearly 500 ASTM standards are used as the basis of national standards in China,” explains ASTM International President, James A. Thomas.  “ASTM has had close ties with standards organizations in China for many years.  Chinese participation in ASTM standards development continues to grow, and having the ASTM Board of Directors here—in this great city—represents our continued commitment to China.”

Connections between ASTM and Chinese standards organizations reach back two decades when visits to China by ASTM in the 1980s laid the foundation for the joint publication of a Chinese-language edition of the ASTM magazine, Standardization News, with the China Association for Standardization (CAS). ASTM’s involvement in China also includes agreements with the Chinese National Institute of Standardization (CNIS) and the Shanghai Institute of Standardization (SIS). In 2004, ASTM International partnered with three other standards organizations to form the Consortium for Standards and Conformity Assessment (CSCA) and opened an office in Beijing. The CSCA office was supported through a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Contact
For more information on the week of the ASTM Board of Directors meeting in Beijing contact Liu Fei (phone: 86-10-5109-6033; fax 86-10-5109-6039; fliu@astm.org).  To attend the Roundtable Discussion on October 18, register via email by October 17 (amchamevent@amcham-china.org.cn).

Release #7494