The General Administration of Customs (GAC) announced on Tuesday the launch of a new insurance program designed to support cross-border commerce.
To enhance the business environment and facilitate cross-border e-commerce retail import trade, the GAC on Tuesday initiated a pilot program for cross-border e-commerce retail import tariff guarantee insurance in the cities of Qingdao, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Jinan, Chongqing, and Chengdu.
Cross-border e-commerce enterprises now have additional options for securing insurance guarantee customs clearance, complementing the original two modes: deposit and bank guarantee. With insurance documentation, these enterprises can benefit from the convenience of "post-release duty payment" when their imported goods clear customs.
The retail import tariff guarantee insurance in cross-border e-commerce requires that qualified insurance companies provide tariff guarantees for cross-border e-commerce enterprises. If these enterprises fail to pay customs duties in accordance with regulations, the relevant insurance companies will cover the outstanding tax payable to customs as specified in the insurance contract. This model eliminates the need for enterprises to secure a quota from the bank through physical collateral or to pay a substantial tariff deposit.
"The rate of tariff guarantee insurance is about 1.5 percent, and the guarantee amount can be used repeatedly throughout the year, with one application being valid for the entire year," said Bi Haijun, director of the Tariff Department of Qingdao Customs.
China launches new insurance to support cross-border commerce
Honor's humanoid robot, Lightning, which swept the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on Sunday, is a natural extension of years of accumulation in consumer electronics technology, said its developers.
A leading smart device provider in China, Honor independently developed the model, which dominated the podium at the event as it was used by all three teams whose autonomous navigating robots ran the fastest times.
At the Honor factory in Pingshan District in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province, where robotics engineers developed Lightning. They said the robot's body design incorporates a simulation system that, through artificial intelligence algorithms, can iterate nearly 30,000 design schemes of varying sizes over three months. Complete and mature systems are also in place for battery, communication, and reliability verification.
"We built a simulation lab from scratch. For the robots, we digitize the entire design and put it into a computer. We have our own material library, which can meet the force, thermal, and chemical property demands for each component, under different environments and speeds. We've accumulated about 1000 kinds of materials. For example, if there's a risk with the robot's neck, we just need to change the material code from 001 to 002. Now, through our simulations, we only need one day to perform parallel calculations on 10 different designs, before creating a mold and verifying it in the lab," said Li Zheng, a senior engineer at Honor.
An autonomous robot capable of completing a half-marathon involves a complete industry chain, with core components including high-precision sensors, LiDAR, motors, operating systems, and control algorithms. The development of robotic marathoners have driven an increasing number of component enterprises to get involved.
Manifold, a tech firm established by newly-graduated PhDs, has developed a 3D spatial memory module, which can model an environment in real time and transform it into images that robots can understand. They said several robots running the half-marathon this year adopted their solution.
"Our device can operate within a one-kilometer tunnel with an error margin of only tens of centimeters. For robots, especially in the absence of GPS, this allows them to accurately determine their location. The underlying technology is a multi-sensor fusion technology that we developed in-house," said Qin Youming, CEO and founder of Manifold.
The Beijing Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center set up a training camp for the marathon event. Many university students came a month ahead of the event to develop and debug their technologies and algorithms based on open-source robot bodies, databases, and training platforms.
"These high-quality databases and highly open-source control algorithms are actually very helpful to us. We no longer need to build the house from the ground up, but can skip the most basic part," said Sun Jingyu, a student from Shandong University.
"Through this racing event, I believe we can make our robots more reliable and stable, while also supporting high-dynamic, high-load movements. This is crucial for robots' future application in both industrial, commercial and domestic scenarios," said Guo Yijie, head of the innovative humanoid department and the Marathon project of Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
Engineers share development story behind Beijing humanoid half-marathon champion model
