Customs in Lanzhou, the capital city of northwest China's Gansu Province, have significantly enhanced cross-border trade efficiency by streamlining customs clearance procedures and introducing the JSQ freight train, a special locomotive model dedicated to the transportation of automobiles.
Unlike traditional container trains, exported vehicles can drive directly into the JSQ carriages without the need for racks. Each carriage can accommodate 10 vehicles, leading to a 50 percent increase in overall transport capacity.
Cross-border train transit efficiency is further boosted by programs that promote faster customs clearance.
"Lanzhou Customs has established a 'green channel,' enabling export goods to be loaded onto trains in just two hours after arrival, significantly shortening the customs clearance time. Since the first JSQ train was launched in October 2024, a total of 41 JSQ trains have been dispatched, transporting 11,407 exported vehicles with a value of 1.239 billion yuan (about 170 million U.S. dollars)," said Wang Hongliang, chief of Jincheng Customs under Lanzhou Customs.
Lanzhou has also strengthened its air freight network by launching international cargo flight routes connecting the city with Moscow, Russia and Almaty, Kazakhstan.
In 2024, the cargo throughput at Lanzhou Zhongchuan International Airport reached 4,864.5 tons, with the total value of imports and exports amounting to 1.4 billion yuan (about 190 million U.S. dollars), marking year-on-year increases of 100 percent and 69 percent respectively.
Lanzhou customs streamlines procedures, introduces automobile-moving trains
Significant progress has been made in clearing the debts of financing platforms with the central bank support, said the governor of China's central bank Thursday.
At a press conference on the sidelines of the third session of the 14th National People's Congress, Pan Gongsheng, governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), said many efforts have been made in recent years to achieve the goal.
"Significant progress has been made in clearing the debts of financing platforms. Along with relevant departments and local governments, the PBOC has implemented several effective measures to mitigate the debt risks of local financing platforms," said Pan.
Pan noted that in 2023, the central bank established a standardized and systematic debt statistical monitoring framework for financing platforms. Local governments and financial institutions regularly submitted debt data in both directions, enabling cross-verification. Additionally, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, strict exit standards and procedures for financing platforms were put in place.
"Through efforts of multiple parties, the debt risk of financing platforms has substantially diminished. By the end of 2024, compared with the beginning of 2023, approximately 40 percent of local government financing platforms had shed the financing functions through market withdrawal and transformation. The scale of operating financial debt for financing platforms stood at 14.8 trillion yuan (about 2 trillion U.S. dollars), marking a decrease of about 25 percent from the beginning of 2023," the governor said.
Among the operational financial debts, about three-fourths are concentrated in major economically developed provinces in the eastern and central part of China, and these provinces have strong debt-dissolving ability, Pan said.
Significant progress made in clearing debts of financing platforms: PBOC governor
