Shanghai releases latest plan to boost business environment

The city of Shanghai in East China -- one of the country's major commercial and financial powerhouses -- released its latest action plan on March 2, designed to further optimize its business environment.

A total of 31 tasks, with 207 measures, were proposed. These cover five main areas, including optimizing government services, improving enterprises' management services and creating a market environment for fair competition.

The plan made it clear that more than 95 percent of the municipal government's services will be run online in 2021 and technologies such as online identity authentication and electronic seals will be promoted to cover all high-frequency business matters for enterprises.

The goal of comprehensively improving enterprises' management services has always been a priority for Shanghai in the wider process of optimizing its business environment.

The action plan outlined several measures focusing on achieving the goal, such as paperless establishment registrations, data sharing between business registrations and opening bank accounts, as well as more streamlined procedures.

In order to create a market environment with fair competition, Shanghai will deepen reforms in six areas -- including market access, inclusive prudential supervision, credit supervision, comprehensive law enforcement and government procurements and bidding.

Shanghai has been formulating annual action plans for optimizing business environment since 2017 and has completed all the targets and tasks in each stage.