Abstract：In October 2021, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the National Standardization Development Outline, which proposed the establishment of a system for reference of regulations to standards. This is an institutional innovation. To build a foundation of theoretical knowledge of this new system, we need to accurately grasp its connotation. Combined with the current conditions of Chinese standardization and legislation, it is necessary to interpret the “reference of regulations to standards” with the key words from a theoretical perspective.The first key word, “regulations”, should not be narrowly interpreted as “administrative regulations and local regulations”, but should be interpreted as “law” in a broad sense, which includes laws, regulations (administrative regulations and local regulations), rules (State Council departmental rules and local governments rules) and all the other normative legal documents that act as the source of law, including the normative administrative documents, normative judicial interpretation, and the like. In the Chinese legislative practice, where there is normative legal documents that act as the source of law, there is the case of regulations referring to standards.The second key word, “standard”, should be interpreted as the “standard” in the context of standardization. It refers to “the technical requirements that need to be unified in the fields of agriculture, industry, services and social services and others”. A standard in the sense of standardization is a document developed by a standardization body “in accordance with prescribed procedures and by consensus, which provides rules, guidelines or characteristics for common use and reuse for various activities or their results”. According to the Standardization Law, Chinese standard system includes national standards (mandatory national standards, recommended national standards), industry standards, local standards and group standards, enterprise standards. In the Chinese legislative practice, standards referred by regulations includes Chinese standards, and, under certain circumstances (mainly referring to product imports), also includes international standards and foreign standards.The third key word, “reference”, in the standardization theory, refers to the term “by referring to another document number or document content number in the document, so that the content of the document referred to constitute the content of the document referred to it”. Once the standard is referred by other documents, the implementation (application) of the document referring to the standard also means that the referred standard indirectly to be implemented (applied), so the reference to standard is an indirect way of the implementation (application) of the standard. Standards can be referred by another standard and by a regulation, the latter is the “reference of regulations to standards”. When a standard is referred in a regulation, compliance with the standard constitutes a legal obligation. This means that the standard is incorporated into the system of law. It has the national coercive force to ensure its implementation of the standard. Enforcement of standards by the state is a powerful way of implementing standards. The ways of Regulations referring to standards includes direct reference (can be divided into “dated reference” and “undated reference”) and indirect reference. The provision “Mandatory standards must be implemented” stipulated in Standardization Law shows no essential difference to the general expression of referring to standard in the regulation. They all express the same meaning, that is, the standard referred in the regulation should be complied, namely, the compliance with the standard referred in the regulation is a legal obligation. Therefore, mandatory standard is also a situation of “reference of regulations to standards”.
柳经纬. “法规引用标准”解释论[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2024, 54(5): 59-70.
Liu Jingwei. An Explanation of the "Reference of Regulations to Standards": Centered on Keywords. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2024, 54(5): 59-70.
2024, Vol. 54 
