CCTV News: On April 18, the Ministry of Commerce issued the "Comprehensive Pilot Work Plan for Accelerating the Expansion of the Service Industry" and a list of comprehensive pilot tasks for the expansion of the service industry in a new round of comprehensive pilot tasks, further giving full play to the role of pilot areas as pioneering and piloting and promoting the acceleration and increase of service industry opening up.

The "Work Plan" mainly includes three aspects:

▶ First, accelerate the pace of pilot implementation. The pilot tasks will be promoted in pilot areas that meet the conditions to improve the efficiency of the pilot work.

▶The second is to expand the scope of the pilot. Nine cities including Dalian, Ningbo, Xiamen, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Hefei, Fuzhou, Xi'an and Suzhou will be included in the pilot scope.

▶The third is to increase the intensity of stress testing and replication promotion. The open and innovative measures involving the service industry proposed by various departments will give priority to pilot areas and carry out stress tests. According to the risk level of the pilot task, timely copy and promote it within the corresponding scope.

The "Task List" proposes 155 pilot tasks in 14 aspects, including supporting the open development of telecommunications services and related digital industries, improving the level of opening up and service guarantee in the field of medical and health care, promoting international cooperation in the field of finance, enhancing the innovative vitality of the commerce, trade, culture and tourism, and enhancing the international competitiveness of the integration of the "two industries". In the next step, the Ministry of Commerce will work with relevant departments to strengthen guidance and coordination and promotion, organize supervision and evaluation work, promote the implementation of pilot tasks, and play a demonstration and leading role in the openness, innovation and development of the service industry in the country.

Experts: It is timely to accelerate the opening up of the service industry

Experts said that promoting the acceleration and increase of opening up of the service industry is an important choice for my country to independently expand opening up in the face of the new situation. Expanding the opening up of the service industry is not only a real need for China to integrate into the world economy at a higher level and deeper level, but also an objective need for China's high-level opening up.

Zhang Wei, deputy director of the Institute of International Trade and Economic Cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce, introduced that because China's negative list of manufacturing has been cleared, the development achievements of manufacturing are obvious to all, but from the perspective of enhancing the country's overall competitiveness, expanding the opening up of the service industry and promoting the integration of the "two industries" is actually a very useful exploration to further enhance my country's development level.

Experts said that this time, the pilot expansion of the service industry opening-up pilot was selected to include more regions with good development foundation and strong industrial representativeness in the service industry. This can better play the pilot demonstration and radiation and driving role of the service industry in expanding its opening-up. The Work Plan also particularly emphasizes the deep integration of modern service industry and advanced manufacturing industry, and emphasizes greater efforts to promote domestic and international dual circulation, which is also in line with the characteristics of China's current development stage.

The service industry expands its opening up and advances in depth in ten years

While continuing to expand the opening up of the service industry across the country, my country has also carried out a national comprehensive pilot demonstration of expanding the opening up of the service industry in some provinces and cities. Before the pilot project of expanding the service industry opening up, the pilot demonstration has gone through ten years of innovative exploration and has been implemented in 11 provinces and cities across the country.

In May 2015, Beijing officially launched a comprehensive pilot work for expanding the opening up of the service industry. Since then, the pilot demonstration has undergone one upgrade and two expansions, forming a pattern of "1 (Beijing Demonstration Zone) + 4 (Tianjin, Shanghai, Hainan, Chongqing and other provinces and cities) + 6 (Shenyang, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Chengdu and other cities)".

Over the past ten years, the pace of pilot demonstration exploration has continued to expand in depth, and has successively launched 7 rounds of 15 pilot plans and more than 1,300 pilot tasks, and promoted the opening of 13 key service areas such as science and technology, finance, telecommunications, and culture. The pilot content has expanded from industrial opening to the integration of "two industries", regional development, institutional and mechanism reform and factor guarantee.

Over the past ten years, pilot demonstration provinces and cities have actively explored in the opening up of industry fields, cultivating new business forms and models, and institutional innovation, leading and driving the open development of the national service industry. With less than 3% of the country's land area, 11 pilot demonstration provinces and cities have achieved more than 1/4 of the added value of the service industry, more than half of the service industry's foreign investment and more than 60% of the service import and export, becoming an important engine to lead and drive the open development of China's service industry.