Recently, the website of the General Administration of Customs published the transcript of the deputy director of the State export office answering questions from reporters. Many of them are related to logistics, such as improving the overall efficiency of import and export goods clearance, improving the informatization and intelligence level of port clearance, and expanding the smooth cross-border e-commerce logistics channel. The details are as follows:
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Reporter: in the past few years, China’s port business environment has been continuously optimized. What measures has the General Administration of Customs taken to continuously promote the facilitation of customs clearance, improve the efficiency of customs clearance, reduce the compliance cost of import and export, and make every effort to promote the stability of foreign trade and foreign investment?
Dang Yingjie: as the leading department in optimizing the business environment at ports, the General Administration of customs, together with relevant state departments and local governments, has conscientiously implemented the decisions and plans of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, continuously intensified its work, introduced a series of policies and measures, adopted a series of hard measures, strengthened supervision, optimized services, and continuously improved the level of cross-border trade facilitation, It has made due contributions to the promotion of high-quality development and high-level opening up of foreign trade. It is mainly reflected in:
First, further streamline the import and export supervision documents. In 2020, the General Administration of customs, together with relevant departments, will further sort out and analyze the import and export supervision certificates. In accordance with the principle of “canceling the certificates that can be cancelled, and canceling the certificates that can exit the port for verification”, the General Administration of Customs will continue to promote the simplification of supervision certificates, and realize the merger of two kinds of import and export supervision certificates and the cancellation of one kind of Supervision Certificate from January 1, 2021. At present, the number of regulatory certificates that need to be verified in import and export links has been reduced from 86 in 2017 to 41, a decrease of 52.3%. Among these 41 kinds of supervision certificates, except for 3 kinds that can not be connected to the Internet due to special circumstances, all the other 38 kinds of certificates have been applied and handled online. Among them, 23 kinds of certificates have been accepted through the “single window” of international trade. All the supervision certificates have been automatically compared and checked in the customs clearance process, and enterprises do not need to submit paper supervision certificates to the customs.
Second, further reduce the overall clearance time of import and export goods. The state port office should strengthen the guidance of local ports, regularly monitor and report the overall clearance time of all provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities), and strengthen the coordination of key ports to minimize the impact of the epidemic on import and export. On the premise of respecting enterprises’ independent choice of customs clearance, the national customs constantly improves the fault-tolerant mechanism, encourages enterprises to choose “early declaration”, expands the pilot of “two-step declaration” for import, and reduces the time for declaration preparation, transit processing and customs clearance. In qualified ports, it is necessary to actively pilot and promote the “ship side direct delivery” of import goods and the “arrival direct loading” of export goods, so as to enhance enterprises’ expectation of customs clearance time and facilitate enterprises to reasonably arrange transportation, production and operation activities. For the imported auto parts exempted from CCC certification, the declaration shall be made before verification, and the acceptance of the third party inspection results shall be continued. Through the above measures, the time of customs clearance at the port has been significantly reduced. According to statistics, in March 2021, the overall import clearance time was 37.12 hours, and the overall export clearance time was 1.67 hours. Compared with 2017, the overall import and export clearance time reduced by more than 50%.
Third, further reduce the cost of import and export compliance. Last year, in order to reduce the impact of the epidemic on enterprises and help enterprises tide over difficulties, the executive meeting of the State Council repeatedly studied the issue of tax reduction and fee reduction. Since March 1, the port construction fee for import and export goods has been exempted, and the charging standards for port service fee and port facility security fee have been reduced by 20% respectively. The policy measures to benefit enterprises, such as phased reduction and reduction of port charges, have achieved actual results. The relevant departments of the state strictly implement the administrative fee management system, clean up and standardize the operation and service fees of import and export links, and work together to reduce the compliance costs of import and export links. The national development and Reform Commission and other seven departments jointly issued and implemented the action plan for clearing up and standardizing the charges at sea ports, and put forward policy measures such as promoting and improving the port charges policy, establishing the supervision and investigation system for the charges at sea ports, and standardizing and guiding the charging behavior of shipping companies. Since 2018, all ports across the country have made public the list of charges, announced the charging standards and realized the marked price. The list of charges at ports across the country has been made public to the public. The state port office has organized the development of a “single window” national port charges and service information release system to promote the online disclosure and online inquiry services of port, shipping agent, tally and other charges to the national ports. To promote the implementation of “one-stop sunshine price” charging mode at conditional ports, and further enhance the transparency and comparability of port charges.
Fourth, further improve the level of informatization and intellectualization of port clearance. On the one hand, vigorously expand the “single window” function. Last year, in view of the impact of the epidemic situation on import and export, “single window” timely launched the function of declaration and customs clearance service for epidemic prevention materials, gave full play to the advantages of the whole process online processing, realized “zero contact” for enterprise affairs, “zero delay” for goods customs clearance, “zero failure” for system operation, and helped enterprises to resume work and production. Innovate the “foreign trade + finance” mode, launch online international settlement, financing loan, tariff guarantee insurance, export credit insurance and other financial services, effectively solve the problem of financing difficulty and high financing cost of small, medium and micro enterprises, and support the development of real economy. At present, the “single window” has achieved docking and information sharing with the total system of 25 departments, serving all ports and various regions in China, with a total of 4.22 million registered users, 18 categories of basic service functions, 729 service items, 12 million daily declared business, basically meeting the “one-stop” business processing needs of enterprises, and the degree of inclusive service has been continuously improved. On the other hand, we should vigorously promote paperless and electronic customs clearance. Shanghai, Tianjin and other key coastal ports have strengthened the construction of Port Logistics comprehensive service platform, continued to implement the electronic documents of container equipment handover list, packing list and bill of lading, and promoted the electronic issuance of export bills of lading by international shipping companies. We will increase the application of terminal automation, unmanned container trucks and intelligent tallying, promote the transformation of “smart port”, realize multi-party sharing of logistics data, and greatly improve the efficiency of goods in and out of the port. Key coastal ports actively promote the integrated service linkage of “customs clearance + logistics” at ports, implement the time limit system for port operations announced by port units, and rely on the “single window” to push the inspection notice information to ports and port operation stations, so as to enhance the expectation of enterprise customs clearance. Deepen the construction of “smart customs”, vigorously promote the installation and use of h986, CT and other machine inspection equipment at ports throughout the country, expand the application scope of intelligent map examination, increase the proportion of non-invasive inspection, and further improve the inspection efficiency.
Fifth, we should further coordinate the prevention and control of the epidemic and promote the steady development of foreign trade. Since the outbreak of the epidemic last year, the General Administration of customs and relevant departments have worked together to promote the prevention and control of the epidemic and promote economic and social development. Strengthen the guidance and coordination for local ports, quickly start the emergency response mechanism for major public health emergencies at ports, and strengthen the control and Quarantine of entry-exit personnel; Adhere to accurate prevention and control, implement differentiated prevention and control measures according to the different characteristics of air, water and land ports, dynamically adjust the port epidemic response strategies, and timely close the border port inspection passage according to the principle of “passenger stop and cargo pass”. Research and develop the national port operation display and analysis system, monitor the operation status of national ports, especially border ports, do a solid job in preventing and controlling the import of overseas epidemic from ports, and build up the defense line of foreign import prevention.
Reporter: after the impact of the epidemic, China’s foreign trade recovered rapidly in the second half of last year. Combined with the characteristics of cross-border e-commerce and the blowout growth of China EU trains, how can the General Administration of Customs (state port office) better optimize the port business environment? In view of the current trend of foreign trade development, what are the shortcomings of optimizing the port business environment and how to improve it in the next step? How to build a more convenient platform for foreign enterprises’ trade and investment in China? What are the examples to share?
Dang Yingjie: Generally speaking, since the second half of last year, China’s foreign trade operation has maintained a restorative and rapid growth trend. Novel coronavirus pneumonia is still spreading globally, and the world economic situation is still complex and severe. Foreign trade development faces many unstable factors. However, China’s customs has constantly innovating and optimizing the regulatory system, and has launched a series of targeted measures to support the orderly development of cross-border electricity providers and central Europe. For example, the Customs has launched a comprehensive promotion of cross-border e-commerce export commodity return supervision measures, carried out innovative cross-border e-commerce enterprise to enterprise (B2B) export pilot, expanded smooth cross-border e-commerce logistics channels, made every effort to ensure the orderly customs clearance of cross-border e-commerce business peak commodities such as “double 11″, and improved cross-border e-commerce statistics and other measures. The General Administration of Customs has issued 10 measures to support the development of China EU trains, which will boost the development of China EU trains by allowing the merging of railway manifests, effectively reducing the number of customs declaration, supporting the construction of China EU train hub stations, and promoting the development of China EU train multimodal transport business.
In recent years, China’s port business environment has been continuously optimized and remarkable results have been achieved. However, there are still some difficulties and problems in benchmarking against the international advanced technology. For example, since last year, the import and export enterprises have reflected that the transportation capacity of international routes is tight, and the “one container is hard to find” and other problems need to be solved through overall planning and coordination. In view of the diversified demands of enterprises, there are still “short boards” in port collaborative governance, in-depth cooperation between customs and enterprises, and cross department data sharing, which need to be supplemented.
In order to better match the international advanced standards, focus on the concerns of market players, and promote the high-quality development of foreign trade, at the beginning of this year, the General Administration of Customs organized and launched a four month special action to promote cross-border trade facilitation in 2021 in eight cities (ports) across the country The State Administration of market supervision and other departments jointly launched 18 policies and measures to solve the problems of “blocking points”, “pain points” and “difficult points” concerned by the current market players in terms of optimizing process, reducing cost, pressing time and improving efficiency. At present, all tasks are progressing smoothly and have achieved the expected results.
For example, due to the characteristics of maritime logistics, it takes a relatively long time for the goods to go through the customs clearance and wharf operation procedures at the port. The quality of the goods with high timeliness requirements, such as imported fruits, tends to deteriorate due to the detention at the port, and some urgently needed export goods are often unable to get on board due to many import and export goods at the port, lagging operation arrangement and other factors, Facing the loss of booking cost and the risk of contract breach. In order to improve the efficiency of customs clearance at maritime ports, we vigorously promote the pilot implementation of “ship side direct delivery” of import goods and “arrival direct loading” of export goods at qualified ports, so as to provide more optional customs clearance modes for enterprises. Through the coordination of port terminals, cargo owners, shipping agents, freight forwarders, transportation enterprises and other units, optimize the operation process in many ways, realize the release of goods on arrival, effectively improve the efficiency of customs clearance, reduce the time and cost of cargo loading and unloading, stacking, waiting at the terminal, reduce the logistics cost of enterprises, and release the stacking capacity of the terminal. At present, “direct loading” and “direct delivery” business have been widely carried out in major coastal ports, which has brought real dividends to enterprises. Taking Tianjin Port as an example, by adopting the method of “ship side direct lifting”, the time from the arrival of imported goods to waiting for loading and shipment is reduced from the original 2-3 days to less than 3 hours.
Source: General Administration of Customs
Post time: Jun-04-2021