ACFIC Secretary-General Cheng Lu and DIHT Resident Project Representative Helmut Schoenleber today signed an agreement on computer equipment support to one hundred regional chambers on prefectural level in all major provinces of China. The computers have been donated by DIHT with funding by the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The move aims to help regional federations who are not yet equipped with office computers to participate in the national membership database, which is being developed with financial assistance of DIHT and the German government. The ACFIC membership department, the information center, a development team of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Resident Project Representative have cooperated in developing a membership data management system consisting of a decentral data entry module for the regional federations, a central database, a conversion and management module and a database platform for the internet.

Internet users will be able to search the database by branch, products, names, addresses and further information about most enterprise members. To date, the database is bilingual Chinese and English, later German and French additions are being planned. The regional federations enter their members' data from the jointly designed membership registration form in Chinese. The decentral data entry module includes an automatic conversion of Chinese company name and address to the official Pinyin alphabet. Product and branch are entered by internationally standardized codes, i.e. the HS product code used by most customs administrations worldwide and the NACE code which is based on ISO standards. The codes are entered via a Chinese pop-up menu on two levels and then internally translated into English by reference tables. The ACFIC database is the first one in China that is completely based on international standard codes.