The capital city of Shenyang in Northeast China's Liaoning province has ramped up its efforts in opening-up over the past decade and made great progress, local officials said.
In 2021, Shenyang's foreign trade hit a record 141.6 billion yuan ($19.74 billion), increasing about 10-fold from 2012, according to data from the Shenyang statistics bureau. Its export volume rose 76.8 percent year-on-year to 48.49 billion yuan. Meanwhile, imports expanded 23.5 percent to 93.11 billion yuan.
Zhao Ge, director of the city's commerce bureau, said that Shenyang is committed to implementing the country's dual-circulation strategy, which takes the domestic market as the mainstay while internal and external markets boost each other, with the aim of building itself into an international hub in Northeast Asia. By 2021, the city had established trade relations with more than 220 countries and regions worldwide.
New forms of trade such as cross-border e-commerce have become a new driver for the city's foreign trade growth, Zhao said.
The China (Shenyang) cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zone has opened four customs supervision modes since its establishment in 2018. In 2021, the city's trade volume of cross-border e-commerce reached 2.59 billion yuan, up about fourfold year-on-year, according to data from the commerce bureau.
In the past 10 years, a total of 15,118 foreign-funded projects were launched in Shenyang, with investors from 121 countries and regions.
The city has built several international industrial parks to attract investment and expand international cooperation. These include the TusHoldings Sino-South Korean Sci-tech Park and the China-Germany Equipment Manufacturing Industrial Park in Shenyang, which has been recognized as a national smart manufacturing demonstration zone.
Key projects such as BMW's new energy vehicle plant provide strong impetus for local industries' transformation and economic growth, Zhao said. He added that the city pressed ahead reforms of systems involving business entities and activities to offer better services to investors from abroad. All administrative items in the commerce sector can now be dealt with online, according to Zhao.
Meanwhile, sustained efforts were made to simplify customs clearance procedures. As a result, in the first half of this year, the average customs clearance time for imports and exports in Shenyang was shortened by 91.71 percent and 93.36 percent respectively compared with the same period of 2017.
As one of the logistics centers in Northeast China, Shenyang has formed an extensive network consisting of air, rail and sea transportation.
Since its opening in 2017, China-Europe freight trains (Shenyang) have launched routes to more than 50 cities across 20 countries.
From January to June, the city handled 340 China-Europe freight train trips in total, a year-on-year increase of 47.8 percent.
zhanglinwan@chinadaily.com.cn
The China-Germany Equipment Manufacturing Industrial Park in Shenyang is recognized as a national smart manufacturing demonstration zone. CHINA DAILY
