By Zhao Xiaohui

    BEIJING, May 14 (Xinhuanet) -- After paying "patent rent" for many years, Chinese high-tech companies are faced with more and more intellectual property rights disputes and trade barriers. It has become an urgent task for China to strive for more say in making technical standards.

    "The formation of technical standard has shifted from 'marketdecides standards' in the past to today's 'standards lead markets'," said Zhang Qin, deputy director of the State Intellectual Property Office.

    He said that it is of great significance to boost China's own industries by making use of technical standards.

    In the high-tech field, technical standards have become important weapons for multi-national companies to protect themselves. At present, China mainly relies on foreign companies in core technologies. Lack of patent and technical standards has seriously affected the competitiveness of Chinese companies in thearea.

    Statistics show that about 99.8 percent of 16,000 internationalstandards are made by foreign institutions. Only two per thousand of those standards involve the participation of China in the standard-making process.

    There was a series of conflicts in the past two years focusing on patent and intellectual property of technical standards, only astart of the standard disputes which are predicted to be more heated in the future five to ten years, according to experts.

    "Chinese companies must develop high technology and we must make our own technical standards if we hope to change from 'made in China' to 'made by China'", said Liu Qingtao with the research and development department of Lenovo Group.

    In fact, many Chinese companies have mobilized to form homegrown standards in the high-tech area. Thirty Chinese companies, research institutions and universities, headed by Lenovo, have proposed a technical standard on how to share information among televisions, computers and mobile phones.

    The standard agreement has been delivered to the Ministry of Information and will be ratified in the near future, said Liu.

    Meanwhile, as homegrown standards in the third generation mobile communication technology (3G), TD-SCDMA has also won a place for Chinese companies in the international mobile communication market.

    "Economic globalization has pushed the technical standard to the frontier of competition in international market and China's economic and social progress has highlighted the importance of being strategic," said Yu Xinli with China National Institute of Standardization.

    China initiated research on a development strategy of technicalstandards in 2002. According to the strategy, which has not been finished, the essential task of China's technical standard development is to enhance the competitive ability of high-tech standards before 2020.

    Apart from the government, civil research institutes also actively participate in the studies. A report released by China Labs on Wednesday said in the first period of standard strategy, China must cultivate its own multi-national companies to play a leading role in standard making.

    Besides, China should learn how to take advantage of its huge market in forming its own technical standards, the report said. Enditem