China has industrialised faster than any other country in the world, but the drive towards improving occupational health standards in the country is increasing writes Anna Kelsey-Sugg.

Australian occupational physician Dr Peter Honeyman is assisting in this process by providing occupational health services and advice to some of the country’s biggest companies, including BHP, Bosch and Intel.
Honeyman believes that occupational health and safety standards in China – while more complex to develop and maintain than many might realise – are improving rapidly. "Things are changing," he says. "There's a long way to go but change is happening very fast.”
So what are the differences?
There’s an increasing pull among larger Chinese companies towards matching Western standards of occupational health, fuelled in part by International Standard Organisation (ISO) certification, almost a necessity to trade as a multinational company.
Chinese state-owned petroleum company SINOPEC is just one Chinese company Honeyman has worked with to gain ISO certification. While SINPOEC is largely a government department, it acts as an independent company, trading in everything from explorations in Africa to drilling to the shipping of oil into China.
When SINOPEC wanted to build operating systems based on those in Western oil exploration companies, Honeyman’s advice covered a range of written instructions and protocols on health and safety: “everything from how to measure noise and when to do hearing screening on people, how to set up hygiene systems, how to immunise for going into Africa – a pretty large list of things that you need to know if you want to act as a multinational company that’s going into remote and difficult areas.”
Such considerations for many employees and employers in China are new ones. “It’s complex,” says Honeyman, “for instance, if you run a clinic to service all your remote exploration, then you suddenly have to think about where you dispose of all your medical rubbish and sharps. This is absolutely a new way of thinking.”
With its newness comes one of the biggest difficulties attached to the maintenance of occupational standards – finding appropriately trained and knowledgeable employees who can understand and follow the safety principles outlined in new policies.
"There aren’t a lot of Chinese specialists in safety or hygienists. The biggest gaps are probably training up the people to do all the supervisory functions in safety,” he says.
Those who are trained up as safety specialists are in such short supply and high demand, they are often poached by other companies.
Attitudes to occupational health and safety in China is changing. “The growth,” says Honeyman, “is spectacular.” And it is being led, often by multinationals coming into China.
Bosch is one of those setting an example. It has been manufacturing car parts in China since pre-World War One, and it is now installing state of the art German manufacturing equipment. “[Bosch] wanted their Chinese workers treated with all the safety and care exposure consideration as in a Western country,” says Honeyman – and the company isn’t exceptional. “Nearly every one of the multinationals go in and, contrary to what most of us think, they set up conditions that are fantastic.”
This includes companies like Nike and Adidas, who now have systems in place to inspect factories prior to contracting employment. "They will not buy from [the factories] if they do not provide not only decent contracts, but decent wages.”
Public campaigns against unethical and unhealthy working conditions are, it seems, bearing fruit. “A lot of the pressure of learning has meant that most of these big companies have become pretty ethical. In the main they tend to try to be fairly socially responsible.”
Honeyman is the first to extol the virtues of companies taking OHS seriously as he has seen all sides of the spectrum such as small scale logging companies going to Papua New Guinea, conducting business exploitatively and unsustainably, and where “It’s cut, slash, destroy and you’ve taken your profit”.
Companies intent on staying around, on the other hand, are learning how to behave as many of the bigger ethical companies do, and with the right motivation. “They’re doing it for really good, sound business reasons, which are that they can work with other Western companies and that they’re sustainable.”

*Anna Kelsey-Sugg is a journalist with the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (AFOEM).