Recently, the Ministry of Science and Technology ("MOST") has issued the 13th Five-Year Special Plan for Scientific and Technological Innovations in Modern Service Industries (the "Plan").
The Plan sets forth the goal of making breakthroughs in a number of key technologies for some key fields by 2020, which will be adopted to support the construction of 10 to 20 national engineering technical research centers for modern service industries, national key laboratories and enterprise technical centers. To this end, the Plan proposes specific requirements in multiple aspects, including "strengthening theoretical studies of modern service industries and improving the research and development of generic core technologies", "promoting the extension of the production service industry to the higher end of the value chain" and "actively cultivating and developing emerging service industries". In addition, the Plan makes it clear to regulate and support innovations and startups under certain investment, such as the angle investment, foreign-funded investment and insurance funds, and support the development of new structural and compound financial products; the Plan also calls for supporting qualified innovation-oriented enterprises and startups to increase their investment in innovations by issuing corporate bonds and carry out the pilot program of equity-based crowd-funding financing, and fostering a number of fintech institutions such as technical banks, technical insurances and financing guarantee.