Liberate the mind and let free trade zones boldly try and make mistakes. Former Deputy Minister of Commerce: Insufficient openness will affect China's development
"Our opening up has encountered institutional bottlenecks, and insufficient opening up can lead to sluggish reforms, hindering the full unleashing of China's development potential. Therefore, we urgently need to find a breakthrough." On September 20th, at the "Opening up" sub forum of the 10th anniversary theme forum of China's free trade zone construction, former Deputy Minister of Commerce and former Deputy Director General of the World Trade Organization, Yi Xiaozhun, said, "This is also why the central government has repeatedly emphasized the need to promote a higher level and greater degree of opening up to the outside world."
"China's accession to the WTO is the most typical and successful institutional opening up, fully reflecting the marketization, rule of law, and internationalization brought about by reform and opening up." Yi Xiaozhun said, "After joining the WTO, various industries in China have made significant progress in fierce international competition, and the people of the whole country and the world economy have benefited greatly from China's high-level institutional opening up. Therefore, continuing to promote more institutional opening up, especially in the service industry, should be the focus of future work in the pilot free trade zone."
Yi Xiaozhun believes that in the current economic situation, adhering to the promotion of institutional opening up will boost the confidence of multinational corporations in investing in China, which is a strategic measure to improve the external economic environment and break through the high walls of small courtyards. The pilot free trade zone should serve as a vanguard and assault team for the new round of reform and opening up, and use China's courage and courage when entering the WTO to explore and pave a new path for the country.
He suggested that the administrative authorities should further liberate their minds, dispel concerns, give greater reform autonomy to the pilot free trade zones, and allow breakthrough pilot projects in terms of rules, systems, standards, etc. against high standard economic and trade agreements such as CPTPP and DEPA. The next step for the Shanghai Free Trade Zone is to focus on key and difficult areas such as state-owned enterprises, government procurement, digital trade environment, and labor clauses, benchmark against the highest standards, identify weaknesses, boldly try and make independent changes.
"Institutional openness is a trial and error process of crossing the river by feeling the stones. As long as the overall direction is well grasped, even if there are some small errors in the exploration process, as long as they are controlled within the scope of the free trade zone, the risks are controllable and it is not difficult to correct them," said Yi Xiaozhun.