http://www.bjreview.com AUGUST 29, 2019 BEIJING REVIEW 35
Copyedited by Rebeca Toledo
Comments to [email protected]competitiveness and enhancing the coun-
try’s science and technology innovation
capability amid a complicated and volatile
external environment,” Yin Chen, Secretary
General of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone
Comprehensive Research Institute with
Fudan University, told Xinhua.
Breakthroughs
He Wanpeng, head of the Shanghai
Qiantan New Industry Research Institute,
said Shanghai took the lead in the country
in setting up a pilot FTZ. At the time, the
FTZ focused on facilitation of investment,
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plan for the special area, the focus will shift
to liberalization.
“The change of one word indicates
that China has made substantive leaps in
expanding opening up,” He told People’s
Daily.
Zhou Guoping, Deputy Director of
the Development Research Center of the
Shanghai Municipal People’s Government,
XINHUACars, fresh from the factory, wait to be loaded onto cargo ships at Nangang Port of Lin-gang in Shanghai on August 6
told the online media outlet ThePaper.cn
that the existing areas of the Shanghai
FTZ focus more on trade and investment
facilitation measures featuring simplified
procedures and a reduction in costs, while
the special area will stress liberalization and
seek to make groundbreaking institutional
innovation on a deeper level.
Liberalization and facilitation have
an essential difference, said Sun Yunxin,
Deputy Director of the Research Institute
for the Shanghai FTZ at the Shanghai
University of Finance and Economics, in an
interview with People’s Daily.
According to Sun, facilitation means
the relaxation of existing restrictive policies
and the coordination of different govern-
ment departments, while liberalization
means the promotion of comprehensive
free flows of production factors, which
requires completely new management sys-
tems concerning the free flow of capital,
technologies, personnel and information.
This will stimulate some key reforms in the
special area, bringing great advances toreform and opening up in Shanghai and
the entire country.
“It is expected that China’s opening
up will be strengthened and accelerated,”
Wang Xiaosong, a research fellow with the
National Academy of Development and
Strategy of Renmin University of China,
told Xinhua.
However, risks brought about by a
higher level of opening up should not be
ignored, Zhou said. In his opinion, there
are two major risks in the opening up of
the special area, namely, the movement of
goods and personnel, and the cross-border
flow of capital. He suggested authorities
design multidimensional risk management
systems and provide measures such as
making credit ratings an important basis
for enterprises to enjoy favorable policies,
which will be conducive to improving the
capability of risk prevention. QBUSINESS