This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, China’s first free trade zone. According to official data, about 84,000 companies are registered there today. This reflects the dynamic business environment that has been created through bold innovation.

Over the past decade, the foreign trade volume of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone has tripled, reaching 2.1 trillion yuan last year. Yangshan Port City has become China’s first special integrated customs zone. There, in the first seven months of this year, foreign trade volume grew by more than half compared with last year. Yangshan ranks first among all bonded zones in China in terms of growth rate. The local preferential customs policy introduced in 2020, as well as the inclusion of Shanghai’s Lin-gang district into the zone, have played an important role in driving this growth.

“Yangshan was the first to launch an import and export model that involved the immediate release of goods by customs. So far, 40 per cent of companies in the zone are doing business under this system. When imports or exports meet certain conditions and do not require certificates or other customs control procedures, companies can pick up their products immediately by self-declaring them at customs,” said Xiaojun Shen, deputy director of second-class customs inspection of Yangshan Customs of the PRC.

“As an innovation, we have developed a control model based on big data. Based on the cross-border trade platforms established by Shanghai Customs, we cooperate with Lin-gang Special Area to build a universal service platform. And our system can work with different enterprise planning strategies, ERP and WMS, which means we can get companies’ data, manage their complete lifecycle and process,” he added.

The plan for the next decade is clear – to maintain and multiply growth by continuing to improve customs procedures to attract more traders, hence finance and opportunities, to the zone, as reported by CGTN, a partner of TV BRICS.

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