Guoyuan Port in Liangjiang New Area, Southwest China's Chongqing municipality. [Photo/liangjiang.gov.cn]

On Sept 14, Chongqing Customs and Changsha Customs signed a memorandum on cross-regional customs cooperation, which will focus on establishing a contact coordination mechanism, strengthening the development of logistics channels, enhancing business cooperation and exchange, promoting high-quality industrial development, and implementing the overall national security policy.

There are a total of 20 specific cooperation measures involved, marking a new stage of coordinated effort between the two customs. Among them, promoting smart logistics supervision in the Yangtze River Economic Belt is their top priority.

In order to further optimize the customs clearance process for foreign trade goods in the tributaries of the Yangtze River, Chongqing Customs and Changsha Customs are focusing on practical supervision and jointly developing five functional modules closely related to water transport operations, including ship operation supervision, container supervision, electronic fences, intelligent early warning, and logistics organization coordination, relying on a single international trade window to create a Yangtze River logistics smart supervision system. From January to August this year, the throughput of foreign trade containers at Chongqing's water ports reached 503,000 TEUs, a year-on-year increase of 22.38 percent.

According to the memorandum, Chongqing and Hunan will jointly promote the development of China-Europe freight trains, enhance statistical analysis and research capabilities, explore the implementation of smart supervision for the identification of packaging containers for exported lithium batteries, and jointly support the expansion of specialty agricultural food products for imports and exports.