Reforming Systems and Institutions for Opening Up and Stimulating High-Quality Development

Throughout China's modernization drive, we have made new achievements through opening up to propel reform and development. High-quality development requires commensurate and coordinated high-standard opening up.

A core feature of high-standard opening up is institutional openness. An urgent task China currently confronts in its development is to create systems and institutions geared toward high-quality development. Since the introduction of the policy of reform and opening up in 1978, China has constantly reformed its systems and institutions, with mutual promotion between greater opening up and deeper reform. Reform is no less complex, reactive, and arduous today than it was in the initial period of reform and opening up. We must focus on institutional openness to spur domestic institutional reform and innovation and conduct reform in more critical and unexplored areas by developing new institutions for high-standard opening up. Only by doing so can we achieve significant unity of purpose between high-standard opening up and high-quality development at the institutional level.

We will increase our openness to flows of commodities and production factors and encourage their flow in greater volumes and higher quality. To this end, we must further promote tariff concessions, reduce import tariffs on industrial products and certain energy resources, and lower import tariffs on everyday items that have a direct bearing on people's lives. We will also adjust import tariffs on certain advanced technological equipment and key components at appropriate junctures and increase imports of high-quality consumer goods, advanced technology, key equipment, and energy resources. 

Furthermore, with a focus on promoting high-standard opening up, we will continue our reform across the board and expand institutional opening up with regard to rules, regulations, management, and standards, so as to ensure high-standard institutions for high-quality development. We need to make greater efforts to match the high standards of international economic and trade rules, and concentrate on developing pilot free trade zones, free trade ports, and trials of opening up the service sector. We also need to open up further and relax restrictions on registered capital and methods of investment in key areas. We will increase innovation in systems and mechanisms, reduce further the negative list for foreign investment, and accelerate improvements to regulatory models compatible with new models and new forms of business such as digital trade. We shall institute sound negative list management for cross-border trade in services, reform behind-the-border management related to SOEs, intellectual property rights, and market procurement, resolve deep-seated problems restricting a more open economy, and foster a world-class, market-oriented, and law-based business environment. We will persistently promote high-standard opening up based on the rule of law, develop the rule of law in foreign-related affairs in the course of expanding opening up, and consolidate the legal foundation for high-standard opening up.

Editor: Jiang Wenyan