China publishes draft law on safety of hazardous chemicals to seek comments 
On Dec. 26, 2024, China’s national people’s congress published on its website a draft Law on the Safety of Hazardous Chemicals. It is seeking comments on the draft through Jan. 25, 2025. The draft law consists of 124 articles in nine chapters. The notable points of the draft that would affect Japanese-owned businesses are outlined below.
Chapters of the draft
- Chapter 1: General Provisions
- Chapter 2: Planning and Placement
- Chapter 3: Safety in Production and Storage
- Chapter 4: Safety in Use
- Chapter 5: Safety in Handling
- Chapter 6: Safety in Transportation
- Chapter 7: Hazardous Chemical Registration and Emergency Response
- Chapter 8: Penal Provisions
- Chapter 9: Supplementary Provisions
Strict safety requirements for hazardous chemical companies
The draft requires business entities producing or storing hazardous chemicals to conduct safety risk assessments, implement classification-based safety risk management, and establish a process safety management (PSM) system, as well as requiring them not to jeopardize work safety by using processes, technologies, equipment or facilities that should be phased out. The draft includes stricter safety standards for managers and employees of hazardous chemical companies. In addition, it requires importers of hazardous chemicals to provide GHS labels and SDSs.
Safety in research and development
The draft introduces strict safety requirements for divisions of entities engaged in research and development of hazardous chemicals. It includes new safety rules for the research and development of new processes and technologies for hazardous chemicals.
Safety in hazardous chemical use
The draft requires entities using hazardous chemicals (business entities, research institutions, testing organizations, etc.) to establish safety rules, implement classification-based safety risk management, provide chemical safety labels and SDSs to employees, and ensure that their employees know how to respond to emergency situations.
Safety in hazardous chemical handling
The draft includes stricter requirements regarding the licensing, recording and notification to the authorities of highly toxic and explosive hazardous chemicals. It requires principals of entities and workers of entities in charge of safety management to pass a special assessment.
Safety in hazardous chemical transportation
Hazardous chemicals should be transported as normal goods when they can be clearly managed as normal goods. Consignors of hazardous chemicals must provide dangerous goods manifests and SDSs to transporters, and attach GHS labels to the packaging (including external packaging) of hazardous chemicals.
Hazardous chemical registration and emergency response
The draft introduces a registration exemption provision that exempts hazardous chemicals from registration if only small quantities of hazardous chemicals are involved and released, and their exposures to people are low during the processes of research and development, test production and test marketing. However, the details of the exemption mechanism have yet to be worked out. The State Council, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Public Security and other government departments are jointly working on it and expected to issue the details later.
As for accident reporting and the post-accident procedure, the principals of entities involved in accidents and transportation-related workers involved in accidents during transportation are required to report the accidents.
Penalties
The draft expands the scope of illegal actions, listing offences across production, storage, use, handling, transportation and other activities involving hazardous chemicals. The draft raises the upper limits on specific penalties, and introduces stricter penalties, including license revocation, for increased punishment.
The draft (in Chinese) is available at
http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c2/kgfb/202412/t20241225_442053.html.
