Decrees issued over capital's trade zone

City government initiatives move to expand opening-up and advance digital economy

Beijing issued three key documents on Monday to speed up its construction of a pilot international free trade zone for opening-up the service sector, the digital economy and technological innovation.

The documents contain concrete measures to realize the visions of China's top leaders. The central government will support the municipality in developing a national integrated demonstration zone for greater openness in the services sector. It will enable Beijing to take bigger, bolder steps as a trailblazer and gain more experience that would be replicable and scalable.

According to an action plan, which is one of the documents released by the Beijing Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, a mechanism for digital economy development will be set up with six focuses: infrastructure construction, digital industrialization, industry digitization, digital governance, data valuation and digital trade development.

Spanning 2020-22, nine major projects will be carried out. Local officials said that technologies such as supercomputing, 5G and artificial intelligence will be used.

By 2022, the added value of Beijing's digital economy is planned to account for 55 percent of the city's GDP.

The 2019 figure was 50 percent, topping the country. It showed Beijing's competence to become a key innovation and development hub of the digital economy, local officials noted.

The digital trade pilot zone will make use of the resources at Zhongguancun Software Park, the Jinzhan International Cooperation Service Zone and the Daxing Airport Area of the China (Hebei) Pilot Free Trade Zone, another document released by the Beijing Commerce Bureau revealed.

Meanwhile, a document released by the Beijing Local Financial Supervision and Administration said an international big data exchange will be established in the city.

It will be a platform for authoritative data information registration, data exchanges, data operation and management covering the entire industrial chain, data-centric financial innovation service and new technology-driven data.

On the same day, the Beijing Bureau of Economy and Information Technology and Beijing Financial Holdings Group signed agreements on sharing public data in certain areas to benefit enterprises.

The digital economy is now considered a key driving force of China's economic growth.

Official data showed that since 2012, China's digital economy has increased from 11 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) to 35.8 trillion yuan, accounting for 36.2 percent of GDP.

yinruowei@chinadaily.com.cn