Lately, the State Council has issued the Circular on Effectively Working on the Fourth Wave of Replicating and Promoting the Reform Experience of Pilot Free Trade Zones (the "Circular").
According to the Circular, 30 reform items will be replicated and promoted this time, among which, 27 items will be generalized nationwide. In particular, five items will be promoted to further open up the services industry, including the wider scale in establishing partnership law firms jointly owned by partners from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Macao and more opening-up moves in international shipping services; another six items will be put in place in the investment management sector, including the online processing of registration by general value-added tax payers and the reform of "granting one permit for industrial product production to each enterprise"; experience in another nine items will be replicated in the sphere of trade facilitation, including the trans-departmental one-time joint inspection and the system to supervise inspections of inbound bonded metallic mineral products; and successful practices in seven items, with respect to in-process and ex-post regulatory measures, will be generalized, such as the mechanism to share information submitted by enterprises and the whole-process paperless corporate registration and access to the "China Electronic Port". Furthermore, three items will be replicated only in certain areas, such as the innovative regulation mode, featuring "voluntary record-filing, self-determination of the writing-off period, autonomous declaration, autonomous payment of overdue tariffs and streamlined business approval formalities", in areas under special customs supervision.