China on April 10 unveiled guidelines for accelerating the building of a unified national market, aiming to break local protectionism and market fragmentation and removing key obstacles hampering economic circulation, as part of a wide-ranging push for an effectively regulated, fairly competitive and fully open market across the country. The guidelines cover energy, technology, property rights protection and market regulation, and are intended to address some persistent problems in the country's shift toward being market-oriented, experts said. They described the new guidelines issued by the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council, the cabinet, as a vital boost to China's two-pronged focus on economic development and security. The new regulation aims to shift the market from being big toward becoming powerful.
The announcement came roughly four months after the guidelines were reviewed and approved at the 23rd meeting of the Central Committee for Deepening Overall Reform in mid-December. To implement the new development paradigm, it is imperative to speed up the building of a unified national market that is efficient, standardized, open and allows fair competition. It is also vital to establish unified market rules and regulations across the country and promote the smooth flow of goods and resources on a wider scale, President Xi Jinping said while chairing the December meeting. Xi urged efforts to speed up the transformation of government functions, improve the efficiency of government oversight, promote better alignment between an efficient market and a capable government, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of companies and people's lives and property. The announcement is expected to inject confidence into both the consumer market and producer market in anticipation of unified and coordinated rule-setting and implementation when it comes to labor, capital and innovation, among various parts of the market, Cao Heping, Economist at Peking University, told the Global Times.
The regulation urges the elimination of varied rules and practices that hamper a unified market and fair competition, calling for the breaking of “various small closed markets and self-centered small circulations." The guidelines also promote the creation of a unified national energy market for natural gas, electricity and coal, the Global Times reports.
