As China has been putting unremitting efforts into improving its business environment and energizing the market in the past few years, more substantial incentives and reforms have been put in place to sustain the nation’s robust recovery from the blow of the pandemic. The State Council of China recently issued a regulation on the registration management of market entities to optimize registration procedures, simplify application materials, and lower institutional costs.
In a recent interview with China Daily, Ren Ting, an associate dean and professor at Peking University HSBC Business School (PHBS), shared his insights regarding the regulation. Ren identified the most prominent feature of the new guideline is that it formulates a general and unified practice for all types of business, covering the entire process of registration, information update, and business cancellation.
Ren and his PHBS colleagues have kept a close watch on the changes and improvement of China’s business environment. They provided academic support for the 2019 China City Business Environment Report, which used the World Bank’s business environment evaluation standards as benchmarks while considering the characteristics of the Chinese business milieu. The report shows that major cities play a leading role in comprehensively optimizing the nationwide business environment extending from the central cities to the surrounding cities.
The regulation on the registration management of market entities will take effect from March 1, 2022, and is seen as an important step to effectively invigorate China’s tens of millions of market players in the long run.
“This will notably stabilize market anticipation for government’s regulatory approaches and foster a stable, fair, transparent, and predictable business environment,” Ren said to China Daily.
He believes a facilitated registration process for market entities is the key step in energizing the business environment, as registration is the start of a business’s life cycle. “If there is no strong willingness in starting businesses in the first place, there won’t be anything of a market economy. This is why a standardized, facilitated market registration is so important in accessing market oversight and government services,” Ren reflected.
Moreover, as he maintains, the facilitated registration will dismiss the concerns for startups and allow businessmen to focus on good operations instead of worrying about complicated procedures and unwarranted institutional costs, eventually stimulating entrepreneurship and motivating market players.
