The Chinese central government has released a new directive for the modernisation of market regulation during the period of the 14th Five Year Plan.
The State Council issued the “14th Five Year Market Regulation Modernization Plan” (“十四五”市场监管现代化规划) in late January, for the purpose of “pragmatically maintaining fair competition, strengthening intellectual property rights and protections for the rights and interests of consumers, and continually raising the administrative services level in the sphere of market regulations.
The Plan covers 71 “key missions” across six areas, including:
- Ongoing modernization of the commercial environment and full invigoration of the vitality of market actors. This includes deepening reform of the system for entry and withdrawal of market actors, strengthening the development vitality of market actors, strengthening the innovative capability of market actors, and raising the level of fair regulation.
- Strengthening comprehensive regulation of the market order and operating a fair and competitive market environment. This includes overall coordination and increase of anti-trust and anti-unfair competition regulatory capability, and overall coordination and optimisation of the online and offline market competition ecosystem.
- Maintaining and improving a unified domestic market, and expediting full clearance of market circulation. This includes improving and maintaining a unified domestic market policy system; strengthening and improving effective measures for a unified domestic market, and continually improving regulatory mechanisms that are suitable for a unified domestic market.
- Improving quality policies and technical systems and high-quality growth in services. This includes improving macro-economic quality policy systems, the establishment of a modern economic system quality infrastructure, and in-depth implementation of campaigns to raise quality.
- Firmly guarding the baseline of security, and strengthening protection of the rights and interests of consumers. This includes driving the development of food safety standards, steadily improving the security, effectiveness and reach of pharmaceutical safety, ensuring the safety of the operation of special equipment, strengthening the safety regulation of industrial product quality, and raising the level of protection of the rights and interests of consumers.
- The establishment of a modernised market regulation system, and comprehensive increase in the efficiency of overall market regulation. This includes improvements to the basic market regulatory system, improvements to the market regulatory system mechanisms, innovation and diversification of market regulatory tools, improvements to credit regulation mechanisms, and strengthening of basic market regulatory capabilities.