The Opinions of the State Council on Launching the Pilot Program for Business Environment Innovation (hereinafter referred to as the Opinions) were recently issued, deploying business environment innovation pilots in six cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen—focusing on the concerns of market entities, accelerating the creation of a first-class market-oriented, law-based, and internationalized business environment, and making greater efforts to benefit enterprises and the public.

The Opinions propose that, guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, efforts should be based on the new development stage, fully, accurately, and comprehensively implement the new development philosophy, build a new development pattern, take promoting high-quality development as the theme, coordinate development and security, take institutional innovation as the core, grant qualified localities greater autonomy for reform, further transform government functions, advance the reform of streamlining administration, delegating power, combining decentralization with management, and optimizing services in an integrated manner, promote the optimization of approvals across the entire chain, impartial regulation throughout the entire process, and service improvement across the entire cycle, better combine an efficient market with a capable government, push the business environment to a higher level, further stimulate market vitality and social creativity, better stabilize market expectations, and maintain stable economic operation.

According to the Opinions, the first batch of reform items for the business environment innovation pilot consists of 101 reform measures in 10 areas.

Among them, in terms of improving a more open, transparent, standardized, and efficient market entity access and exit mechanism, it is convenient for market entities to handle relevant procedures such as name registration, information changes, bank account opening, and deregistration; the account-opening bank generates a reserved account number for the enterprise account and pushes it through an online platform to the tax, human resources and social security, and housing provident fund management departments; optimize the procedures for disposing of land and real estate of bankrupt enterprises. For construction projects in enterprise bankruptcy cases where completion acceptance cannot be handled due to missing debtor information or the failure of third-party institutions (such as design, survey, and supervision units) to cooperate with completion acceptance, real estate registration may be handled after entrusting relevant professional institutions to conduct a safety appraisal of the project quality and passing the appraisal.

In terms of continuously improving investment and construction convenience, advance the reform of the "land use list system" for social investment projects, trial the phased integration of relevant surveying and mapping matters, implement online parallel processing of administrative approvals involved in municipal access projects such as water, electricity, gas, and heating, carry out "one-window acceptance" for joint acceptance, further optimize the joint acceptance method for engineering construction projects, simplify the completion acceptance filing procedures for engineering construction projects subject to joint acceptance, trial separate completion acceptance for unit projects that have met their intended use functions, delegate some administrative approval authority for engineering qualifications, establish and improve the architect responsibility system, and promote the orderly development of individual architect practices.

The Opinions emphasize the need to adhere to combining decentralization with management and placing equal emphasis on both, consolidate regulatory responsibilities, improve the full-chain and full-process regulatory mechanism before, during, and after the event, and implement systems such as punitive damages in areas directly involving public safety and the lives and property of the people. It is necessary to accelerate the breaking of information silos, expand the scope of system interconnection and data sharing between departments and localities, and promote the safe, efficient, interconnected, and shared use of more data resources.

The Opinions require establishing a dynamic update mechanism for reform items, regularly evaluating the innovation pilot work, and promptly replicating and promoting reform measures that have proven effective in practice and are welcomed by market entities in a wider scope. It is necessary to adhere to steady implementation and advance the innovation pilot work in an orderly and in-depth manner under the premise of controllable risks.