hina’s State Council on December 7 released a plan on high-level institutional opening-up in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, proposing to build Shanghai into a demonstration area for national institutional opening-up and deepened reforms.
The plan lists 80 measures covering seven areas, including promoting high-level opening-up in finance and telecommunications, facilitating cargo trading across borders by simplifying formalities, implementing a set of high-standard rules for digital trading and exploring data sharing and opening-up, increasing protection of intellectual property, as well as improving reforms in government purchasing and State-owned enterprises.
According to analysts, the plan emphasizes high-level opening-up that connects to international practices and combines opening-up with deeper reforms.
The plan is seen as one of the highlights of the government’s recent policy packages for expanding opening-up. Just a day after the Shanghai plan, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange issued a document on further facilitating cross-border trading and investment, which will expand previous facilitation measures in pilot areas to other parts of the country, with an emphasis on easing cross-border financing and technological innovations.
The same day, China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao met with his counterpart from Singapore and signed an agreement on upgrading the bilateral Free Trade Agreement which adopts overall negative lists in cross-border services trading, investment, telecommunications and the digital economy, and increases trade privileges.
Wang said that the new agreement will urge the Chinese government to make more efforts in institutional reform and opening-up and will further stimulate cooperation between China and Singapore. It is a strong response to what Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a letter to the 6th China International Import Expo (CIIE) held in early November 2023 that China will firmly advance high-standard opening up and continue to make economic globalization more open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial to all.
From November 28 to December 2, 2023, Beijing hosted the first China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE), which aims to increase the connections between upstream enterprises and downstream ones worldwide. The expo attracted 53 Fortune 500 enterprises, 57 of China’s top 500 enterprises and an array of other leading private enterprises. More than 200 deals and cooperation agreements worth a total 150 billion yuan (US$20.9b) were inked at CISCE.
Experts spoke highly of the expo’s effect in promoting international cooperation in supply chains.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also announced measures to show China’s strong determination to expand opening-up, announcing in late November that China will implement visa-free travel for people from France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia that come to China for business, tourism, visiting relatives or friends or transit, for no more than 15 days. The new policy is effective between December 1, 2023 and November 30, 2024.
According to the Foreign Ministry, in the first three days, over 7,000 foreigners applied for visa-free entry, about 39 percent of the total passengers from the six countries who entered China in those three days.
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