Hi Laura,

Hm.. that’s an interesting article. Based on what I know and read about their China Pilot Program is that CFI is NOT working with China’s FDA or any governing regulatory body.

In their original article of when they first announced the China Pilot Program, they never claimed to be working with China’s FDA. Cruelty Free International says they’re partnering with Knudsen&Co and Fengpu Industrial Park.

From my research, Knudsen is a specialized consulting company in Shanghai. They’re NOT a government regulatory agency of China. Their role in this is to basically supervise the manufacturing and processes of these brands in China and report back to CFI.

And according to Knudsen’s website, Fengpu Industrial Park acts as another safeguard of the process just outside of Shanghai.

So none of these companies that CFI is working with on their China Pilot Project are “Chinese authorities” per se .. they’re more specialists and consultants.

I personally was never under the impression that CFI was working with any “Chinese authorities” on their China Pilot Program. So I’m not sure what happened here… but it’s really interesting! I’m going to have to dig deeper into this one.

If you have more recent news of Chinese authorities agreeing to the program I’d love to know, as I was pretty excited about it until I read that.