Of toys on China's domestic market, 87.5 percent meet quality requirements, according to the quality monitoring result released by the State Administration for Commerce and Industry (SACI) on Wednesday.

The quality monitoring, conducted by SACI and involving local administrative bureaus of commerce and industry, covered 120 groups of toys sold by 32 wholesalers and retailers in Chongqing municipality and Jiangxi, Liaoning and Anhui provinces.

China's toy-making industry had experienced an uneasy 2007 amid some toy recall dramas in the U.S. and some European countries, which were major importers of Chinese toys.

The Chinese government responded to this by launching a four-month-long nationwide product quality campaign and offered intensive training courses to domestic toy manufacturers to brush up on their knowledge of international product standards and safety awareness.

This time, testing had been carried out on all the eleven indicators stipulated in national regulation on toys safety, including normal use, reasonable misuse, materials, small parts, edge, pointed ends, intervening space between the moving parts, drives, upper limit of movable elements (antimony, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, selenium) and the toys introduction.

In the testing, 15 groups of toys failed to meet requirements, among which were squirt guns under the brand of "HTTOYS" and plastic toys under the brand of "Hong Jia".

In some cases, small parts were easily pulled off by children, which could hurt them if they are eaten. And in other cases, the introductions were not clear enough, which might mislead the users.

Local administrative bureaux had banned sale of those sub-standard toys and violators would receive punishments according to law, said SACI.

China had thoroughly inspected all 3,000-plus toy makers for export during a product quality campaign that began last August. More than 600 Chinese toy makers have had their export licenses revoked to ensure product quality, the State Administration for Quality Supervision and Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) announced on Monday.

(Xinhua News Agency January 17, 2008)