China's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), on Tuesday released a guideline for building a unified national market.
The move is part of the efforts to implement the key tasks outlined at the tone-setting Central Economic Work Conference held in December 2024, which emphasized the importance of formulating a guideline for building a unified national market.
The guideline aims to encourage all localities and government departments to accelerate their integration into the unified national market and actively support its development, the NDRC said.
The guideline outlined key measures including unifying the underlying institutions and rules of the market, improving the high-standard market infrastructure connectivity, building a unified market for factors and resources, advancing the high-standard integration of goods and services markets, enhancing fair and unified regulation, and curbing unfair market competition and improper intervention.
At a press briefing on the guideline in Beijing on Tuesday, Wang Shancheng, director of the Department of Comprehensive System Reform at NDRC, elaborated on the efforts to accelerate the construction of a unified transportation market.
"All localities should focus on completing the construction of unfinished highways, basically eliminate bottlenecks in the construction of inter-provincial highways on the national network, basically tackle major bottlenecks in the construction of inter-provincial waterways and overcome shipping challenges. They should increase coordination efforts to address the constraints hindering the construction of regional transportation infrastructure," he said.
Besides, Wang noted that those localities, where conditions allow, are encouraged to pioneer in implementing some measures.
"All localities are encouraged to further open up channels for product returns and exchanges across regions and stores, and guide brands which open physical stores nationwide, manufacturer-operated physical stores, and large shopping mall chains and supermarket chains to explore the implementation of product returns and exchanges across regions and stores within the province," he said.
Wang also said that all localities should promote the digital transformation of inspection system and increase the efficiency and transparency of law enforcement.
Efforts should be made to clarify respective responsibilities of market supervision departments, industry regulatory departments, and comprehensive law enforcement departments, and unify data collection standards, formats, and fields between different regulatory departments, Wang said.
China issues guideline for building unified national market
