More policies to further facilitate trade in Hainan

CHINA will roll out 28 policies and measures to further liberalize and facilitate trade in the Hainan free trade port, an official with the Ministry of Commerce said yesterday.

The move is intended to better implement a master plan released on June 1 last year, which aims to build Hainan into a globally influential, high-level free trade port by the middle of the century, Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said.

The policies will allow certain regions to relax their control of import and export qualifications for and quantities of commodities such as crude oil, refined oil and sugar, and cancel their licensing systems for imports such as mechanical and electrical products, he said.

The policies will also involve the improvement of supporting measures, including warning systems related to the quality and safety of imports and exports, as well as rapid response supervision capacities, said Wang.

Hainan has seen robust growth in foreign investment inflow and new market entities as it continues to improve its business environment, Shen Xiaoming, Party chief of Hainan, said yesterday.

Total foreign investment into the island, in actual use, amounted to US$5.27 billion over the past three years, or over half of the total inflow in the last three decades, Shen said.

He unveiled the data at a news conference in Beijing about policy and institutional progress for developing the free trade port, highlighting the region’s efforts including promoting a negative list-based mechanism to ease market access.

Over the past three years, the island also registered some 763,000 new market entities, Shen said.

Meanwhile, the island’s offshore duty-free sales are likely to exceed 60 billion yuan in 2021, up from 30 billion yuan last year, which had doubled from 15 billion yuan in 2019, Shen said.

Hainan has vowed to build itself into an international tourism consumption center. The province has increased the annual tax-free shopping quota per person from 30,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan starting from July 1, 2020.