China Embarks on 100-Day Campaign to Regulate Illegal Practices Involving Health Related Products

False promotion, production and sales of counterfeit health products are the focus of newly implemented joint action campaign involving several ministry level authorities. The optimization of China’s health product regulation system is a major government policy focus precipitated by a high profile case of false functional advertising involving the unnecessary death of a 4 year old girl suffering from cancer.

On Jan. 8, 2019, 13 departments including SAMR, MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology), NHC and MOC (Ministry of Commerce) held a teleconference in Beijing, to iron out details on their respective roles and responsibilities in an intensive 100-day government inspection and rectification campaign to crack down on illegal practices (such as false advertising, counterfeit or substandard products) involving health food products in China.

This joint action is targeted at products and industries that claim to have health benefits, including:

Health food products
Gadgets, clothing and household appliances that claim to have health functions
Services that declare to have health benefits, such as fire therapy
Other illegal activities claiming “health functions”

Each department participating in the campaign announced their work arrangement during the meeting as shown below:

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: establish a 24-hour surveillance system to surveil illegal activity online and curb spam phone calls promoting health products
Ministry of Civil Affairs: strictly investigate health product promotion in the service places and facilities for the elderly
Ministry of Commerce: strictly control direct sales market access
Ministry of Culture and Tourism: investigate the illegal health product promotion scams using low cost tours as bait
National Health Commission: crack down on illegal medical practice falsely claiming to be traditional Chinese medicine healthcare

Professor Liu Junhai from China Renmin University said “the lack of a normative functional evaluation standard is now the biggest problem in China’s health product market. There is no reference testing standard for functional evaluation and experimental design requirements to establish clinical efficacy of products is also inadequate.”

Wang Xixin, professor of Peking University, stated that “the normalization of this increased supervision may be an efficient way to eliminate the illegal marketing of health products. A specialized executive team should be set up for supervision, and a food and drug special policing unit should be established.”

Impact for International Stakeholders

Above all, enterprises shall ensure that any functional claims used on imported products are compliant with Chinese regulations. Products should avoid using any exaggerated or false promotional terminology. Products also need to be sold through legal channels, and for health food imported via CBEC, the product information presented on the website shall be consistent with the original product label.

Campaign Background

The planning and implementation of this 100-day campaign has been largely prompted by a high profile case involving “Quanjian Natural Medicine Group Co., Ltd.” At the end of 2018, Quanjian became embroiled in a case involving the unnecessary death of 4-year-old girl with cancer whose parents had forgone conventional medical treatment and instead opted to utilize Quanjian products based on the claims of therapeutic efficacy made by the manufacturers of the product. In the wake of the crime several people have been detained and placed in prison.