Qin Pingshan: Building New Support for High-Quality Development through New Advantages in the Business Environment
High-quality development is rooted in the vitality of market entities, and a sound business environment facilitates the better release of that vitality. The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee emphasized the creation of a world-class business environment that is market-oriented, law-based, and internationalized, forming an economic order that is both "dynamic" and "well-managed." General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out that "there is no best business environment, only better," profoundly revealing that the construction of the business environment is a systematic project that is never finished. In recent years, China has utilized the deepening of the "streamlining administration, delegating power, improving regulation, and upgrading services" [1] reform as a grasp, perfecting property rights protection, optimizing government services, and enhancing regulatory efficiency, achieving a significant leap in global business environment rankings. Currently, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is advancing in depth; global industrial and supply chains are accelerating their restructuring, and the world economic landscape faces profound adjustments. Faced with new strategic opportunities, there is an urgent need to build new advantages in the business environment to form new driving forces supporting high-quality development.
Spawning New Quality Productive Forces with an Innovation-Friendly Ecosystem
As the core driving force leading high-quality development, the core elements of new quality productive forces are knowledge, technology, data, and talent, characterized by intangibility, network effects, high mobility, and positive externalities. The gestation and growth of new quality productive forces are inseparable from a sound business environment. Building new advantages in the business environment is, in essence, the construction of an innovation-friendly ecosystem adapted to new quality productive forces—a system that meets the special requirements of innovative activities for the institutional environment.
Fortifying the foundation of innovation and strengthening the full-chain protection of intellectual property rights. During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period [2], the intellectual property protection system must be upgraded toward higher efficiency, greater intelligence, and better synergy. On one hand, the efficiency advantages of administrative protection should be leveraged to improve a nationwide protection network, achieving rapid examination, rights confirmation, and rights protection for patents and trademarks, thereby significantly reducing the institutional transaction costs for innovative entities. On the other hand, a diversification of protection methods should be promoted, actively developing alternative dispute resolution mechanisms such as arbitration and mediation. Additionally, it is necessary to proactively address the challenges of the digital age, strengthening research on protection rules for new types of innovative achievements such as big data and artificial intelligence, and balancing the relationship between incentivizing innovation and promoting the diffusion of knowledge.
Stimulating endogenous motivation and cultivating an inclusive and prudent culture of innovation. In frontier fields such as artificial intelligence and biomedicine, "safety spaces" [3] should be scientifically established to allow enterprises to conduct small-scale testing and verification within a regulatory framework, thereby reducing the costs of trial and error in innovation. Simultaneously, the benign cycle of "technology-industry-finance" should be smoothed, multi-level capital markets developed, and venture capital mechanisms perfected to guide capital toward promising startups, injecting "financial living water" into innovation. Particular effort is needed to develop financial innovations such as pledge financing and securitization for intellectual property to solve the problems of difficulty in valuing and circulating intangible assets.
Unclogging channels for factor circulation and building secure and efficient new-type data infrastructure. In the era of the digital economy, data is a key factor of production, possessing unique attributes such as non-rivalry, reproducibility, and positive externalities. The system of basic data institutions should be accelerated and perfected, clarifying rules for data property rights, circulation and trading, revenue distribution, and security governance. Under the premise of ensuring national security and personal privacy, the orderly opening and authorized use of public and corporate data should be promoted through hierarchical and classified management to maximize the social value of data. The data trading market should be developed in a standardized manner, exploring new business forms such as data brokers and data trusts to promote the compliant and efficient flow and release of value of data factors. Specifically, an assessment and revenue distribution mechanism based on the contribution of data factors must be established to protect the legitimate rights and interests of data producers and processors.
Linking with the Global Economy through Institutional Opening-Up
As the global economic and trade landscape undergoes profound adjustments, institutional opening-up has become an inevitable choice. Building a world-class business environment that is market-oriented, law-based, and internationalized, and constructing new advantages in the business environment, serve as important fulcrums for promoting institutional opening-up.
Consolidating the foundation of openness and deepening the management system of pre-establishment national treatment plus a negative list [4]. National and Free Trade Zone (FTZ) versions of the negative list should be refined, advancing higher-level openness particularly in service sectors such as finance, education, and healthcare. Risk-based differentiated list management should be explored, using scientific regulatory methods to clarify specific management requirements and processes for restrictive measures, thereby reducing compliance costs for enterprises. Simultaneously, the negative list management should be closely linked with mid-event and post-event regulatory systems—such as foreign investment security reviews, anti-monopoly reviews, and industry oversight—to coordinate openness and security, establishing a sound mechanism for risk identification, prevention, and control to effectively safeguard national security and development interests.
Stabilizing market expectations and enhancing the transparency and continuity of laws, regulations, and policies. The comprehensive coordination and pre-assessment mechanisms for enterprise-related policies should be perfected, introducing cost-benefit analysis and impact assessment tools to improve the scientific and forward-looking nature of policy formulation. Normalized and diversified communication channels between the government and market entities should be established, including mechanisms such as "Business Environment Observers," to respond timely to the reasonable demands of enterprises and form a positive interaction between government and business. In particular, policy stability must be strengthened, avoiding "changing orders in the morning and rescinding them in the evening" [5]; transition periods and buffer mechanisms for policy adjustments should be established to protect the reliance interests of market entities.
Expanding the space for openness and proactively aligning with or leading high-standard international rules. Taking the accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) as opportunities, larger-scale and deeper "stress tests" should be conducted during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period. In the field of competition, the principle of competitive neutrality should be fully implemented, ensuring equal competition for all types of enterprises based on fair competition theory and preventing selective enforcement or hidden barriers. In the field of digital trade, diversified solutions such as security assessments and certifications for cross-border data flows should be explored to balance data flow with data security. In the field of sustainable development, the concepts of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) should be deeply integrated into the construction of the business environment, internalizing environmental costs through institutional design so that green and low-carbon development becomes a new advantage for attracting high-quality foreign investment. Through pioneering trials in frontier fields, China's practical advantages in sectors like the digital economy and green industry can be transformed into rule-based advantages, contributing Chinese solutions to global governance.
Optimizing the Overall Ecosystem through Further Comprehensively Deepening Reform
The construction of the business environment during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period must further comprehensively deepen reform and adhere to a systems thinking approach, treating it as a complex giant system composed of subsystems such as market access, fair competition, property rights protection, factor allocation, market regulation, government services, and legal guarantees. The focus of construction should shift from "isolated breakthroughs" to "systemic integration," achieving a qualitative change from "physical superposition" to "chemical reaction" to form new advantages in the business environment.
Strengthening institutional synergy and breaking through barriers in basic market institutions. Efforts should be focused on promoting the systemic integration of commercial systems, credit regulation, property rights protection, and market-based factor allocation, eliminating friction and conflict between institutions. A new type of regulatory mechanism based on credit should be constructed, comprehensively collecting credit information throughout the entire life cycle of enterprises to form precise "credit portraits" and solve the problem of information asymmetry. Based on this, hierarchical and classified regulation should be implemented: for those who are honest and law-abiding, there should be "no interference unless necessary," reducing compliance costs; for those who break the law or lose credit, a "sharp sword should be hung high," [6] increasing the cost of violations and forming an effective incentive and constraint mechanism. In particular, the sharing and application of credit information must be strengthened to break down "data islands" and form regulatory synergy.
Coordinating the relationship between an effective market and a capable government to improve governance efficiency. The "double random and one open" [7] regulation should be fully implemented, promoting cross-departmental comprehensive regulation to solve the problem of multi-headed and repetitive enforcement and reduce interference in normal business activities. The "Internet + Government Services" initiative should continue to be deepened, promoting more items for "one-network processing" and "cross-province processing" to reduce institutional transaction costs. Big data should be utilized to achieve precise delivery of enterprise-benefiting policies and "enjoyment without application" or "direct and fast enjoyment," ensuring that policy dividends are efficiently fulfilled and policy execution efficiency is improved.
Consolidating the legal foundation and providing stable and reliable guarantees. At the legislative level, it is necessary to accelerate the filling of legal gaps in emerging fields such as the digital economy and artificial intelligence, and to revise and perfect regulations related to the market economy to form a complete system of legal norms. At the law enforcement level, the administration must adhere to the law, standardizing discretionary power and fully implementing the "three systems" for administrative law enforcement [8] to prevent selective or unfair enforcement. At the judicial level, equal protection for the property rights of all types of market entities should be strengthened, the application of law unified, judicial protection of intellectual property enhanced, and mechanisms for the rescue and exit of market entities perfected, ensuring that prevailing interest in litigation is realized in a timely manner and perfecting the judicial guarantee mechanism for a law-based business environment.