One plane would leave every two minutes; maintenance workers are busy with the two displayed airplanes. Yesterday afternoon, in Sichuan aircraft maintenance base, the press conference of “promoting free trade reform experiments with high standards and constructing international gateway hub city in a high level” was held in Chengdu.
On April 1st, 2017, what achievements have been made since the official listing of the Chengdu Pilot Free Trade Zone? Which areas have achieved breakthroughs in reforms? What will Chengdu do in the future? Mr. Guo Qizhou, Director of the Chengdu Administration Pilot Free Trade Zone, reported the reform achievements Chengdu Free Trade District has made.
192,00 newly registered enterprises were added throughout the year
“Since the listing of the Chengdu Pilot Free Trade Zone, it has basically achieved the expected goals and annual test tasks of 'having a good start' in 2017.” Guo Qizhou said that the institutional innovation of the Chengdu Pilot Free Trade Zone has achieved preliminary results. The 155 reform tasks in the “Overall Plan” were launched in a comprehensive manner, and the priority was place on moving forward with 133 pilot projects of 84 tasks. As a result, it contributed to the formation of 138 reform practice cases such as “One-order System for Multimodal Concentrated Transportation of China-Europe Train”. Among them, 17 cases are created by Chengdu for the first time, 3 of which were replicated and promoted nationwide, such as “Winpower Technology Financial Services”. Furthermore, nine cases were reported to the Inter-Ministerial Joint Committee of the State Council and replicated throughout the province. The State Ministries and Commissions, the central government units stationed in Chengdu and the provincial departments have issued 37 special documents for the Pilot Free Trade Zone, and decentralized 23 municipal management authorities to the four regions.
The reform dividend was gradually released. In terms of those indicators, such as the number of newly established enterprises, it ranks among the best among the seven newly established free trade pilot zones, and its market players are growing rapidly. In the year, 19,200 new registered enterprises were added in the zone, including 211 foreign-funded enterprises, with a registered capital of RMB 295 billion. Bank of China, Bank of Communications and other financial institutions have successively set up sub-branches in the Pilot Free Trade Zone, where nearly 300 licensed financial institutions have settled.
China-Europe Center is rising to a national-level cooperation platform for Europe
Mr. Guo Qizhou said that the China-Europe Center has risen to a national-level cooperation platform for Europe, and Chengdu has received support to expand the traffic right of airports, increase the frequency of China-European trains, and implement transitional regulatory policies for cross-border e-commerce, which could lay a solid foundation for the development of the open economy in the central and western regions.
In 2017, the passenger throughput of Shuangliu Airport totaled 49.8 million person-trips, while its cargo and mail transportation handling volume is 640,000 tons. Besides, it opened 315 routes, including 104 international (regional) routes with 220 navigable cities and 5 designated commodity ports about seedlings, medicines, chilled products and fruit. It has also promoted the quality of international railway trains. In 2017, 1012 trains were opened, with a total of 1711 trains, ranking first in the city. Furthermore, it has comprehensively improved the network layout on the west, south and east. The international class will open 14 lines from Chengdu to Rhodes, Nuremberg and other places. The “Chengdu-Europe+” ASEAN Sea Railway Combined Transportation Channel will be connected to Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. The “Chengdu-Europe+” interconnection class was opened with 13 domestic hub cities. In 2017, the city's import and export value through airport reached RMB 274.65 billion, an increase of 42.2%, accounting for 70% of the city's total import and export volume; the import and export value of Qingbaijiang railway port totaled RMB 19.71 billion, an increase of 3.6 times.
The total import and export volume in 2017 was RMB 394.18 billion
In 2017, Chengdu was successfully approved to carry out domestic and overseas aircraft engine maintenance business in the Shuangliu Comprehensive Bonded Zone, and the parallel import business of automobiles was steadily advanced. In 2017, Chengdu's total import and export volume reached RMB 394.18 billion, a 45.4% year-on-year increase, and the growth rate ranked first in the sub-provincial cities.
In terms of cross-border e-commerce industry, the construction of the national cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zone has been further promoted, and the Chengdu Port has already met the requirements for carrying out full-scale cross-border e-commerce business. Chengdu implemented 14 innovative measures in four aspects, including innovation of customs supervision mode, optimization of inspection and quarantine supervision process, optimization of exchange settlement and sale services, and innovation of tax collection and management services, and successfully introduced the Bonded Online Purchase and Stock up policy. In 2017, there were more than 150 enterprises on the online platform, and the number of declarations exceeded 200,000.
Chengdu has formulated and improved the “Implementation Plan for the Innovation and Development of Service Trade in Chengdu”, and promoted institutional innovation from eight aspects: the management system, development model, facilitation of service trade and so on. In addition, it has established a joint conference system for service trade development in Chengdu, identify a number of key enterprises (institutions) that support the development of service trade, build a city's service trade key project library, and form a multi-level and multi-field market entity team. In 2017, the city's total service trade reached RMB 96.8 billion, an increase of 19.2%, and the amount of offshore service outsourcing amounted to nearly RMB 10 billion.
Updating and improving the “belt and road” project library
Mr. Guo Qizhou introduced that on the one hand, the open platform is superimposed and enlarged. The operation of “China-Europe Center” makes it become the first platform for cooperation with Europe, which was built by the local government and supported by the national ministries and the EU, so that Chengdu is at the forefront of the country's open cooperation with Europe. 138 institutions and enterprises from 38 countries, including Western China Center of ERICENA, have proposed to settle in. The Ministry of Commerce officially approved the city as the second batch of key cities to join the Sino-British local economic and trade cooperation working group to speed up the city's cooperation with the UK. With the strong support of the Ministry of Commerce, the China-Italy Entrepreneur Committee's Annual Meeting of the Chinese Governing Units, the 22nd China-Finland Economic and Trade Joint Committee and other national-level conferences were successfully held in the city, and the construction of Sino-German, Sino-French and other national industrial cooperation platforms was accelerated.
On the other hand, international economic and trade cooperation has yielded fruitful results. Chengdu successfully held the 2017 “Belt and Road” Central Europe (Chengdu) Innovation Cooperation Summit, the 2017 South Asia (Pan-Asia) Capacity Cooperation (Chengdu) Dialogue, and the “Sino-German Innovation Industry Cooperation Economic and Trade Promotion Conference”. The going out” work has been steadily advanced. Chengdu has implemented the “Going Global Five-Year Action Plan” and continuously updated and improved the “Belt and Road” project library. It has also promoted enterprises to actively participate in the “Belt and Road” construction and guided industry associations to practice “going out” Enterprise Service Alliance. Currently, there are 166 projects under construction and preparing to construction in the countries and regions along the “Belt and Road”, involving more than 10 billion US dollars.
