State Council executive meeting on April 12

The State Council executive meeting, presided over by Premier Li Keqiang on April 12, decided to promote medical treatment partnership systems and strengthen safety and risk prevention in primary and middle schools and kindergartens, and passed a draft on implementation regulations for national statistics law.

Details:>> Quick view: State Council executive meeting on April 12

Key tasks in food safety for 2017

The State Council has released a guideline for work on food safety in 2017, with the goal of ensuring people’s health and safety.

It urged efforts to improve related laws and regulations on food safety, develop and revise national standards in key fields of food safety, carry out measures to prevent pollution in agricultural production, and promote the transformation and upgrading of food industries.

According to the guideline, related departments should also speed up building a legal system on food safety and enhance its enforcement, to strictly crack down on illegal activities.

Details:>> State Council lays out key tasks in food safety for 2017

Safeguarding agricultural production

The State Council on April 10 planned to set up land for production of grain and other important agricultural products, in order to safeguard food supply and security.

The establishment of the function areas is an important measure for the food security. And the State Council urged strengthened policy support for the land.

Details:>> China to set aside land for agricultural production

Pilot program for land planning at provincial level

The State Council approved an inter-department joint meeting system for land planning at the provincial level, as an effort to push forward pilot work in space planning in provinces.

According to the document, the joint meeting should promote the pilot program in provinces, study major issues encountered in the process, evaluate work results and promote successful practices. Meanwhile, it should study laws and regulations involved in space planning, and undertake other tasks from the central government.

Details:>> State Council to promote pilot program for land planning at provincial level

Pensions raised for the elderly

Starting from the beginning of this year, the average monthly payment for pensioners of enterprises, government agencies and public institutions has been lifted by 5.5 percent from the 2016 level, according to a circular issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Ministry of Finance on April 13.

Details:>> China raises pensions for 13th year in a row

Whole-process electronic enterprise registration

The State Administration for Industry and Commerce on April 11 issued a guideline on the implementation of electronic enterprise registration for the whole registration process.

With the reservation of window registration service, an online registration platform dealing with various businesses concerning all registration procedures of every type of enterprise will be put into use before the end of this October.

The guideline also urged formulating registration norms, accelerating construction of the new system, strengthening the management of electronic archives and reinforcing information publicity and credit supervision.

Combating counterfeit agricultural production materials

The Ministry of Agriculture recently adopted the 2017 action plan to fight against counterfeit agricultural production materials.

Non-standard business operations in urban-rural, cross-provincial, and cross-county regions, peddlers without licenses, and other illegal activities will be cracked down.

Plan for the development of cloud computing

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a three-year plan for the development of cloud computing (2017-2019).

The plan proposed key tasks on technology enhancement, industrial development, application improvement, security guarantees and environmental optimization.

With these efforts, China’s industrial scale of cloud computing is expected to reach 430 billion yuan ($62.47 billion) by 2019, making breakthroughs in a number of core technologies as its cloud computing services become internationally advanced, according to the plan.

Transparency for banking products and services

The China Banking Regulatory Commission urged the banking industry to resume its main function of serving the real economy, making efforts to enhance transparency for bank products and services.

It required commercial banks to strictly comply with business provisions in terms of credit, finance, trust and other aspects.

Meanwhile, illegal behaviors and market disorder will be prohibited to make sure financial resources flow to the real economy.

Colleges and universities granted more autonomy

Five government departments, including the Ministry of Education, jointly issued a guideline on deepening reform on streamlining administration in the higher education sector.

Local authorities, colleges and universities will be granted greater autonomy in terms of issues, including the authorization assessment of graduate degrees, specialty settings for undergraduate and junior college education, staffing, evaluation of professional titles and salary distribution.

Assistance policies to facilitate implementation of tax preferential policies

The State Administration of Taxation said that it will release operation rules on tax collection after the introduction of every tax-related policy, making clear specific issues that are the concern of tax leviers and taxpayers, thus reducing costs on both sides.