Beijing to restore consumption to 2019 levels

Beijing strives to restore contact-based sectors to 2019 levels in 2023, such as accommodation, catering and tourism, Yin Yong, acting mayor of Beijing, said in a recent interview with Xinhua News Agency.

Beijing aims to achieve a 5.5 percent rise in total consumption and over 4 percent growth in fixed asset investments in 2023, by leveraging the advantages of the mega-city's market capacity.

Stimulating domestic demand was highlighted as a top priority at the Central Economic Work Conference, held in Beijing last month.

Beijing will deepen its development to emerge as the international consumption center, through government investment and policy incentives, in a bid to spur effective investment across the society and to ensure a sound interaction and dynamic balance between demand and supply.

Two aspects should be emphasized, namely to give full play to the fundamental role of consumption, and to create new hot spots for effective investment.

In terms of consumption, Beijing strives to achieve an annual target of around 5.5 percent growth in total consumption, with 5 percent growth in retail sales of consumer goods and a 6 percent growth in wholesale and retail sales.

Business districts and consumption platforms shall be taken as key channels to encourage spending.

The efforts to create a four-tier commercial consumption structure should be accelerated, composed of an international consumption experience area, an urban consumption center, a regional consumption circle and a community-level circle of convenience stores and supermarkets.

Concerning investment, Beijing's total fixed asset investment is expected to achieve an increase of over 4 percent in 2023 based on the sound momentum of reaching 800 billion yuan ($118 billion) last year.

A number of major infrastructure projects will be launched to sustain the growing trend of investment in key areas.

It is important to make good use of data, the latest and most active factor of production, he added.

To build Beijing into a benchmark city of the global digital economy, more efforts should be made to speed up the construction of edge computing systems, and blockchain arithmetic platforms, to consolidate the development of the digital economy.