Recently, the People’s Government of Sichuan Province has printed and issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Leading Engineering Construction of the China (Sichuan) Pilot Free Trade Zone, which proposed the target to build Sichuan into a world-class high-quality free trade zone that links the east and west, serves the whole country with inland-based foothold and global-oriented perspective by 2022. We have basically finished establishing a legal, international, and convenient business environment, and continued to improve the connective system to the outside world. The modern industrial system has gradually taken shape. The collaborative opening-up between the inland and areas along the borders, rivers, and seas have made remarkable achievements. The Pilot Free Trade Zone has fully demonstrated its leading role in driving the coordinated regional development featuring “one main area and multiple auxiliaries, coordinated development among five areas”. It has become the highest platform for the “four-direction expansion and across-the-board opening-up”, and has become the leading platform for high-quality development in Sichuan, and the backbone for the high-quality development of Sichuan Province.

In terms of institutional innovation, the Sichuan Pilot Free Trade Zone will attach great importance to the 159 reform and testing tasks assigned by the State Council by identifying a number of major reform issues that “may bring about huge changes by slight adjustments”, and focusing on tackling “fragmentation” and “single-handed advancement”. Institutional innovations that are well-tested, precisely targeted, and risk-controllable can be accumulated into institutional experience by strengthening third-party evaluation. The Sichuan Pilot Free Trade Zone will carry out more pilot tests with the province to explore more firsthand experiences and typical cases that can be applied and promoted throughout the country.

In terms of connectivity, the Sichuan Pilot Free Trade Zone will build a pan-European and pan-Asian railway transportation system, and spare no efforts to construct the international aviation hub and the (Sichuan) shipping center in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. It will enhance connectivity together with other places. It will strive to promote the multimodal transportation demonstration project of "highway, railway, waterway" for containers at the Chengdu International Railway Port, and a similar demonstration project for the Sichuan "air + land" Silk Road, and accelerate the construction of China-Europe Train-air-truck Transportation Base. It will promote the construction of the "two railway entrance" of Tianfu International Airport and the international gateway for "airline, railway, highway" multimodal transportation, and support Zigong in building the southwest land port. It will also support qualified cities (states) to establish national open ports, set up new special areas for customs supervision and designated ports for imported goods.

In terms of regional collaboration, it will implement the “two areas” action which includes the pilot area for coordinated reform and the demonstration area for coordinated opening-up between the inland and areas along the borders, rivers, and seas to lead the multi-level and multi-dimensional regional cooperation. Outside the province, it will strengthen cooperation with Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Pan-Pearl Region and other regions, undertake transfers of processing industry and orders in coastal cities, build land ports with cities equipped with logistics nodes in Yunnan, Guizhou, Xinjiang, and Guangxi, deepen the cooperation mechanism of pilot free trade zones in Sichuan and Guangdong, Sichuan and Zhejiang, and learn from the reform and opening up models of Shanghai, Guangdong, Fujian, and Tianjin. As such, it will build a pilot pattern with Sichuan characteristics through exploration. Within the province, it will adhere to the perspective of “across-the-board free trade” to speed up the construction of a coordinated reform and opening up pattern of “one main area and multiple auxiliaries” based on the synergy between the economic circle around Chengdu and the economic zones of southern Sichuan, northeastern Sichuan and Panxi.

In terms of all-round opening up, it will explore to construct the inland free trade port, leading the creation of a three-dimensional comprehensive opening-up pattern. Drawing lessons from Hong Kong and Singapore, it will strengthen interaction with and learn from Hainan. By strengthening basic researches, it will strive to build an inland-oriented free trade port with Chinese characteristics based on the “aviation + railway + water port” that boasts integrated multimodal transportation within the special customs supervision areas.

In terms of the cultivation of drivers, it will launch the “upgradation actions for opening-up” to lead a higher level open economy. It will spare no efforts to introduce foreign-invested enterprises to meet the target of accounting for over one-third of the provincial total, in an effort to build the Pilot Free Trade Zone into a “preferred place for foreign investment” so as to support the construction of the Top Investment Destination in the Central and Western Regions.