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IGRS: A Pioneer in China's Standards Industry

You may not know much, if anything, about "IGRS," but it's going to affect your life in a big way. There's no need for panic, though; this is a good thing that should make your life more comfortable and enjoyable.

IGRS stands for what experts choose to call "information grouping and resources sharing." It is a set of IT industrial standards developed by Chinese scientists and engineers for digital devices. With the application of IGRS standards, online films can be played on television (TV) screens, handsets can be used to operate air conditioners, and the hi-fi in your sitting room can be used to "broadcast" music or any other programme stored in a personal computer in your office room or study.

According to Sun Yuning, a leading expert involved in the development of IGRS standards, "You can play computer-stored photos, music and movies on a regular TV set, by using an ordinary remote control. TV programmes stored in a computer can be transmitted to a handheld telecommunications device-a handset, for example-for on-demand viewing."

Aside from home entertainment, experts say IGRS can be used in mobile information processing and can make office operations easier and more efficient. In late June, the Ministry of Information Industry chose IGRS-1.0 standards as the recommended criteria for China's IT industry.

Sun said, "This is the first set of industrial standards with proprietary property rights in China, indicating that the technological upgrading of China's IT industry has entered a new phase of development. To be exact, IGRS standards are designed to service what we call 3-C industries-the industries of communication, PCs and consumer electronics and products such as TVs, handsets, video players and hi-fis."

IGRS has languished as a concept for some time, a dream cherished by scientists and engineers the world over.

"The IGRS-1.0 standards signify that it is now a reality," Sun, who heads a team of scientists and engineers charged with developing the IGRS standards, said.

When the IGRS Work Group, or IGRS WG as known to industry insiders, was set up in mid-2003, the job involved five top IT companies in China: Lenovo, TCL, Hisense, Konka and Great Wall. More have since joined, including the prestigious Peking and Tsinghua universities and China TeleCom, the country's leading telecommunications operator. According to Sun, more than 40 companies, research institutes and universities are now collective members of the IGRS WG and as such, they are obliged to invest in the IGRS project and will share the profits, if any, generated by the project.

Chinese industries had to follow standards imposed on them by the government for production and quality control before IGRS won official recognition as a set of nationally applicable industrial standards.

"Ours are the first developed entirely by companies, on their own, to suit market demands at home or abroad," Sun said. "In a way, official recognition of IGRS can be seen as a latest development in China's effort to develop a market-oriented economy."

Sun expects membership in the IGRS WG to continue expanding. "It is open to any IT company seeking access to information anytime or anywhere."

The importance of the IGRS WG's work came into the press limelight immediately after its name was revealed in 2003 at a high-tech exhibition in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province. At the Sixth High-tech Fair held one year later in Shenzhen, also in South China, major members of the IGRS WG displayed their first batch of IGRS-based products. One was a Lenovo PC named the Tianjiao A-6, which was capable of automatically establishing wireless connections with consumer electronics and communication devices through built-in IGRS protocols.

Sun and other experts insist that the development of IGRS and the official recognition of IGRS-based standards are meaningful to China's industrial establishment in its entirety, in fact, to the development of the Chinese economy as a whole, not just to the IT industry. 

For well over two decades, when Soviet-style planning held sway in China, industrial standards were established, almost exclusively, by domestic research institutes run by the government and were then imposed by the government on factories, which, likewise, had to produce on the orders of the government. Such standards were often irrelevant to international standards.

"To be more precise," Sun said, "most Chinese standards were far inferior to international standards, and some had been abandoned in foreign countries years or even decades before."

The Chinese economy has become increasingly international since the reform and opening-up drive was launched in the late 1970s, especially since China began implementing the "go global" strategy in the late 1990s. Though it has become one of the world's leading economies, the country has had to make do without internationally accepted standards developed on its own. That state of affairs is changing. The government now calls on companies to adopt the latest international standards in production and management-to "go international" in China's official terminology. 

But it is impossible for Chinese companies to "go international" overnight. "While sparing no effort to do so," Sun said, "Chinese companies have met huge difficulties related, in one way or another, to standards or even 'technical barriers' set up by their international competitors. Take China's exports for example. More than 60 percent of the Chinese exporters have met with technical barriers, and real and potential losses resulting from these technical barriers may run to US$50 billion a year."

In the opinion of Sun and his colleagues, China has an urgent need to develop a full-fledged "standards industry," with a view to building a complete system of industrial standards for application not only in China but also around the world.

"Our IGRS project has played a pioneering role in this regard," Sun said.

Toward the end of 2003, 17 IT giants, including HP, Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Sony, jointly started a project to develop a set of standards for "digital homes," starting with the renovation of domestic appliances. Haier, China's leading producer of domestic appliances, has been doing the same thing on its own. According to sources with Haier, the Haier concept, in general, conforms to IGRS-1.0 standards.

Now that IGRS-1.0 has won official approval, "digital homes" are no longer a remote possibility. Press reports indicate that within two or three years, IGRS-based domestic appliances will enter mass production in China.