Institutional innovations promote growth of Shanghai Free Trade Zone's Lingang New Area

The Lingang New Area of the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone launched a digital platform to promote all-round digital transformation of its Yangshan Special Comprehensive Bonded Zone on Wednesday, which coincided with the sixth anniversary of the new area's establishment.

The digital platform realizes integrated handling of electronic bills of lading, electronic delivery orders and electronic warehouse receipts, which improves the efficiency and security, while enabling the relevant enterprises to use the electronic documents to seek financing support from banks.

That represented the latest effort of the Lingang New Area in advancing institutional innovation as the core driving force for the growth of the new area's economic scale and its in-depth integration into the global value chain.

"With integrated handling of the three types of electronic documents, the new digital platform is able to help our company cut about 30 percent of cost, including the cost of time, during the entire process," said Zhai Hongkai, an executive of an industry development company using the digital platform.

Over the past six years since the establishment of the Lingang New Area, a series of institutional innovation achievements have been made in the new area, where 166 pioneering typical innovation cases have been formed in fields including offshore trade, cross-border finance, cross-border healthcare, and high-end shipping, among which 79 have been rated as pioneering typical cases nationwide.

In terms of cross-border data flows, the Lingang New Area is currently conducting stress tests for higher-standard opening-up.

So far this year, the Lingang New Area has introduced a negative list for cross-border data flows, which has helped more than 200 companies achieve a 70-percent rise in the efficiency of cross-border data flows by June.

The Lingang New Area of the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone would match the standard of the most competitive free trade zones worldwide and would facilitate overseas investment and capital flows and realize the free flow of goods, according to an overall plan for the area issued by the State Council in August 2019.

Institutional innovations promote growth of Shanghai Free Trade Zone's Lingang New Area

Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Thursday presided over a State Council executive meeting that studied work on building a unified national market and reviewed and approved a plan for the development of a modern emergency response system during the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030).

Noting that building a unified national market is essential to advancing high-quality development, the meeting called for deepening institutional frameworks in areas such as property rights protection, market access, fair competition, social credit and market exit mechanisms.

The meeting also urged efforts to advance high-standard connectivity of market infrastructure to facilitate smooth economic circulation and effectively reduce logistics costs across society.

Emergency management is critical to protecting people's lives and property, the meeting said. It called for accelerating the development of a modern emergency response system, deepening reform and innovation in emergency management, and improving coordinated response mechanisms.

Efforts should be made to strengthen risk prevention at the source, enhance monitoring, forecasting and early warning, and accelerate a shift in governance toward proactive prevention, according to the meeting.

A draft revision of the Law on the People's Bank of China was also discussed and approved in principle at the meeting, which decided to submit the draft to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for deliberation.

Chinese premier chairs State Council executive meeting