context: CCP Central Committee and State Council jointly issued an opinion to further improve the unified national market on 10 Apr 2022. Premier Li Qiang 李强 subsequently chaired a State Council meeting to promote the development of a national unified market on 19 May 2023. As the massive single market remains a strong edge of the Chinese economy, with growing calls for strengthening imports and a greater role for the central government to direct the economy, more work to foster the unified national market may follow.
In the development of a unified national market, it is necessary to both break down barriers and build incentives, Li Chunlin 李春临 National Development and Reform Commission deputy director said in a State Council policy briefing on 5 June 2023. This would include
- implementing a unified market access system
- hidden trade barriers should be removed to maintain fairness
- deepening reforms in
- fair competition
- IPR protection
- credit supervision
- removing measures that hinder fair competition in areas like
- mandatory industrial support or investment
- engineering construction
- government procurement
- develop a list of improper interventions in the market
- establishing a rapid response mechanism for problems reflected by businesses
- accelerating the legislative processes of
- the social credit system law
- fair competition review law
- consumer rights and interests protection law
- revising the negative market access list
- facilitating the unification of markets in
- land and labour
- capital
- technology and data
- reforming the performance assessment systems in areas like
- fiscal and taxation
- statistics
- local government performance
- strengthening the regional coordination of industrial policies and spatial planning