On December 18, the Sichuan Provincial Leading Group for Promoting the Development of the Private Sector held a plenary meeting in Chengdu. Shi Xiaolin, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Sichuan Provincial Committee and Governor of the People's Government of Sichuan Province, attended and addressed the meeting. She emphasized the need to thoroughly implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's important statements on the development of the private sector and the guiding principles from the Central Economic Work Conference, act on the provincial Party committee's deployment and requirements, further uphold and fulfill the policies of "two unswervingly" and "three not changes", and support and serve private enterprises with a stronger sense of responsibility. Emphasizing collaboration, she noted that the government and businesses should work together to overcome difficulties, consolidate strengths, and shore up weaknesses. This continuous effort will promote the growth and expansion of the province's private sector, thus providing stronger support for the sustained recovery and improvement of the provincial economy.

Shi Xiaolin pointed out that the private sector is a vital entity for Sichuan's economic growth, innovation, entrepreneurship, and employment absorption, and it plays an indispensable role in driving the high-quality development of the province. We should orient our efforts towards the needs of businesses, offer more targeted and effective support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the private sector to help them overcome difficulties and ensure their smooth operation, and implement practical measures to assist companies in utilizing policies effectively, reducing costs, expanding markets, navigating challenges, maintaining employment stability, and pursuing innovation. By stabilizing private enterprises, we work to stabilize the economy, employment, and market expectations. Efforts should be focused on enhancing the quality and effectiveness of policies benefiting enterprises. We need to move faster to develop a provincial-level smart government affairs platform, strengthen comprehensive online and offline services, promptly establish a corporate credit enhancement system, intensify policy promotion, interpretation, evaluation and optimization, and leverage information technology and government process reengineering to ensure policies are directly and swiftly implemented and enjoyed by the enterprises. Efforts should be made to boost investment confidence. We need to actively highlight the significant development opportunities in Sichuan, facilitate the involvement of private capital in major national and provincial projects, implement new mechanisms for government and social capital cooperation in a standard manner, and promote a sustained and stable increase in private investment. Efforts should be focused on overcoming financing obstacles. We need to improve the policy and institutional framework for financing support, enhance the incentive and constraint mechanisms founded on the social credit system, take solid steps to establish a financing credit "whitelist", and guarantee the delivery of supportive policies for loan renewals. Efforts should be directed towards helping enterprises reduce costs and enhance efficiency. We need to continuously lower administrative costs, operating expenses, expenditures associated with digintelligence and green transitions, and logistics costs throughout society. It is necessary to solidly carry out special actions on standardizing law enforcement related to enterprises and further advance the special governance of infringement on enterprise property rights and the legitimate rights and interests of entrepreneurs, as well as issues such as arbitrary fees and fines imposed on enterprises. We should ramp up to build a rule-of-law and credit-based economy, further strict law enforcement procedures, optimize law enforcement methods, strengthen regulatory coordination, and frequently adopt accommodative and prudential regulation and flexible law enforcement methods, thereby minimizing interference with the normal production and operation of enterprises. We should continuously carry out special actions on clearing arrears owed to enterprises, make full use of policies such as the recently augmented issuance of local government special-purpose bonds, maximize efforts to accelerate the repayment of outstanding debts, improve and implement a long-term mechanism for addressing the overdue payments, thereby helping enterprises to operate with less burden and promoting their healthy development.

Shi Xiaolin emphasized the need to strongly support private enterprises in accelerating their transformation and upgrading. They should adhere to their main business, strengthen their real economy, and hone their internal capabilities, thus embarking on a path of high-quality development, she stressed. It is necessary to guide enterprises to establish a modern corporate structure, which will incrementally enhance their operational and management capabilities. We should support businesses to enhance their technological innovation capabilities, facilitate their growth beyond designated size thresholds, motivate them to go public, improve their rankings on business indexes, promote cloud technology adoption by enterprises, and cultivate the development of more specialized and sophisticated SMEs, champions in specific sectors, prominent companies, and "little giant" enterprises. We should provide active assistance to enterprises in broadening their presence in both domestic and international markets, implement tailored strategies to help enterprises enhance their core competitiveness, strengthen guidance on foreign-related legal and financial services, leverage major events and exhibition platforms effectively, and support collaborative initiatives by businesses to venture into overseas markets and expand their reach. Efforts should be made to improve the working mechanism, deepen regular communication between government and enterprises, further advance the "one-stop government services" reform, continuously improve the efficiency of government services, establish a new type of government-business relationship characterized by cordial and appropriate, clean and proficient interactions, and actively create a favorable social atmosphere, thereby allowing private enterprises to invest with certainty, concentrate on their operations, and pursue entrepreneurial endeavors with peace of mind.

Dong Weimin, Member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Sichuan Provincial Committee and the Executive Vice Governor of the People's Government of Sichuan Province, presided over the meeting. At the meeting, attendees reviewed and approved documents such as the Special Governance Work Plan for Optimizing the Environment for the Development of the Private Sector and the Provincial-level Mechanism for Regular Communication Between Government and Enterprises.