On July 17th, a symposium was convened by the Department of Equipment Industry I of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, gathering major automobile manufacturers. The meeting focused on several critical tasks: further regulating competition within the automotive sector, enhancing product consistency and quality safety, and conducting safety risk inspections and supervision of automotive products.
The meeting directed automobile manufacturers to resolutely resist irrational competitive practices, strengthen product testing, verification, and safety assessments, and firmly uphold the standards for product consistency and quality safety.
Specifically, the directives include: Firstly, to conduct in-depth investigations into product safety risks. Companies are to systematically examine issues within their own operations and those of key component suppliers concerning product consistency, reliability, durability, and the testing of new technologies, in accordance with relevant management requirements. They must conscientiously carry out corrective actions, comprehensively strengthen supply chain management, and reinforce capabilities to ensure production consistency.
Secondly, manufacturers must enhance innovation, design, testing, and validation of products. This involves fully assessing associated safety risks, prudently promoting the application of new technologies in vehicles to ensure compliance with national standards and requirements for protecting human health, personal safety, and property. They are obligated to strictly fulfill their duty to inform consumers and must refrain from exaggerated or false advertising.
Thirdly, there is a call to bolster safety assessments for combined driver-assistance and autonomous driving functions. This requires further strengthening corporate capabilities in areas such as functional safety, safety of the intended functionality, cybersecurity, data security, and software updates, alongside enhancing the monitoring and handling of safety incidents.
The meeting clarified that, moving forward, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will collaborate with relevant departments to deepen actions focused on the production consistency and quality improvement of road motor vehicles. This initiative will concentrate on addressing prominent issues, further intensifying the review of innovative design approvals and testing for automotive products, and conducting inspections of manufacturers' product safety assurance capabilities and production consistency. Management of road motor vehicle inspection and testing institutions will also be strengthened. For manufacturers and testing agencies found to have problems, legal and regulatory measures will be strictly enforced to resolutely safeguard the safety baseline of automotive products.
In a previous interview, the Chief Engineer of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers characterized "internal-competition" as an unfair, irregular, and abnormal form of competition—an unbounded "price war" that poses serious harm to the industry's development.
In fact, as early as May of last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology had explicitly stated its intention to increase efforts to regulate such "internal-competition" within the automotive industry, subsequently launching a series of initiatives to standardize competition in the new energy vehicle sector.
On July 18th, 2025, a separate forum on the new energy vehicle industry was jointly held by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the State Administration for Market Regulation, focusing on further regulating competition within that specific segment.
It is noteworthy that, according to reports, a State Council executive meeting held on July 16th, 2025, explicitly called for promoting the high-quality development of the new energy vehicle industry. The meeting addressed various irrational competitive phenomena in the sector, advocating for a combination of short-term and long-term measures and comprehensive policies to effectively regulate competition. It also emphasized the need to strengthen cost investigations and price monitoring for new energy vehicles, enhance supervision and inspection of product consistency, and urge key automakers to fulfill their commitments regarding payment terms.
Analysis suggests that "anti-internal-competition" policies have evolved, moving from initial industry self-regulation to a more integrated policy framework involving supply-side reforms, the development of a unified national market, and market-oriented reforms of production factors. Sectors such as photovoltaics, automobiles, agriculture, and cyclical commodities are expected to be among the first to benefit from these measures.
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