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BEIJING: China’s top consumer standards official
vowed Wednesday to ensure product safety of Chinese-made toys by
Christmas, amid continuing recalls of unsafe and tarnished products
across the world.
“With Christmas approaching we
want to make sure that kids get good toys and good prices,” Li
Changjiang, the head of China’s General Administration of
Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, told journalists.
“We want to ensure that
children have a Merry Christmas.”
The Chinese government was
strictly inspecting factories nationwide and actively working with
companies to guarantee the safety of their products, he said.
China has been hit by a spate of
product recalls, including toys and baby cribs, that have sullied
the “Made-in-China” brand in the United States and around the
world.
In recent days, a million
Chinese-made Boy Scout badges were recalled in the United States,
while Italian police seized more than 200,000 allegedly dangerous
Chinese counterfeit toys worth $7 million.
Although acknowledging some poor
quality products, Li said more than 90 percent of Chinese products
exported to the United States were free of quality defects.
“These figures all along have
been high, but we have not completely eliminated unsafe products,”
Li said.
China is the world’s top toy
exporter, selling 22 billion toys overseas last year, 60 percent of
the globe’s total.
To address the recent wave of
poor quality Chinese-made products being discovered in the United
States, Li said he was sending a vice minister to Washington this
month to increase cooperation on the issue.
--AFP
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