Chinese officials in Mao's home province of Hunan said they were concerned about the flow of shoddy Mao souvenirs that has flooded the Chinese market.
According to Xinhua, Mao's hometown of Shaoshan sold 124 million yuan (£12.4 million) worth of trinkets last year, of which almost three-quarters were Mao statuettes.
But buyers have complained that some Mao statues do not even resemble the founder of modern China and that substandard statues have melted in the heat or chipped easily.
"The new guidelines include a ban on plastic and plaster because plastic deforms and plaster is easy to break," said the head of the Standardisation department at Hunan province's Quality Supervision Bureau, who declined to give his name.
"We will have a team of art and craft experts working with factories to determine the likeness of the statues, based on photographs of Chairman Mao in historic moments, in order to decide which ones are authentically Mao," he added.
However, the bureau is still unsure what penalties, if any, there will be for factories that produce substandard Mao memorabilia.
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