Pang Dachun, deputy director of the China Homemaking Service Association (CHSA), said the statement was just a proposal for better regulation in the industry, but shouldn't be taken as law. He added it was unlikely to be applied in force by agencies.

While the new statement does seem to provide assistance to maids, some agencies believe it fails to get to the "core" of the problem.

Zhou said the biggest problem for the industry was that most agencies were not standardized, and some functioned without the capacity to run background checks on new maids.

"We can not check their backgrounds. We have to work based on intuition," she said.

According to a consultant of shoudujiazheng.com, a website that provides information on homemaking agencies, there are more than 3,000 maid agencies in Beijing, with 176 members of BHSA. The consultant said the government has given financial support to some homemaking services centers in order to provide free training courses that include cleaning, nursing and cooking.

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