On May 19, 2016, “China Cross-Border E-Commerce Trade Facilitation Seminar”, organized by China Shippers' Association (“CSA”) and School of Public Administration (“SPA”), UIBE, was held successfully at Council Meeting Room, Keyan Building, UIBE. The following people attended the meeting and delivered a speech: Lin Guijun, Vice President of UIBE, Zheng Weidong, Vice President of CSA, Fan Libo, President of SPA. Besides, around 30 representatives of enterprises and organizations attended the seminar, which were from national famous cross-border e-commerce import and export enterprises, logistics enterprises, custom inspection enterprises, free trade areas and export processing zones, and so did comrades from departments and bureaus of Ministry of Commerce. The seminar was chaired by Dr. Xu Chen, Professor of SPA and Director of Green Pass Trade Facilitation Research Center, UIBE.
During the seminar,firstly, Vice President Lin Guijun discussed the case that how SF-Express went through many difficulties and covered those remote areas of inconvenient transportation, like Tibet, to better serve the society, and then he praised that Chinese enterprises did fulfill corporate responsibility and enterprising spirit of overcoming difficulties, create innovation and breakthroughs. At the same time, he pointed out that the economic development policy framework built since the opening-up reform in 1979 improved the development of Chinese economy in general, but it’s a pity that the policy and technology of the framework was not perfect in optimizing service trade, which leaded to the relatively poor performance of Chinese service trade in international competition. Under the big background of stronger trend of economic globalization and regional economy cooperation, it was essential to build trade facilitation service platform to promote the foreign trade development and international competitiveness.
Vice President Zheng Weidong emphasized the importance of combining production, training and research, and expressed that trade facilitation, cross-border e-commerce and global value chain were the important projects during the China’s transition from big trade country to strong trade country, so we needed to give play to the advantages and function of association and universities respectively, co-conduct trade facilitation work for foreign trade enterprise, and propagate related policy of national trade facilitation.
Corporate representatives warmly discussed the issue of China fast-developing cross-border e-commerce trade facilitation from the view of custom and inspection, logistics and transportation, foreign exchange and tax, and corporate risk and credit. Representatives put forward all those difficulties that they met respectively in the process of foreign trade, hoping to take the seminar as an opportunity to reflect the situation to the government, come up with solutions, and protect the interests and rights of foreign trade industry.
Through this seminar, a normalized mechanism had been built, which meant that industrial organizations, colleges and universities, corporate, government departments together serve the trade facilitation of China foreign trade enterprises, which had important theoretical and realistic meaning to improve the international competitiveness of foreign trade enterprises. As China was facing economic structure adjustment and updating, SPA, UIBE, as a key participant of trade facilitation project research, would take national development strategy as a center, bring the advantage of scientific research and features of custom think tank into full play, and continue to provide consultation and technology support for national foreign trade policy-making.
