A State Council executive meeting on Feb 14, presided over by Premier Li Keqiang, decided to advance the upgrade and innovation of the pharmaceutical industry, to promote the development of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and to carry out pilot projects of the service trade.

To boost the development of the pharmaceutical industry, the meeting agreed on the following:

First, enhance the research and development of drugs in urgent need and speed up the industrialization of drugs for frequently-occurring and rare diseases.

Second, improve safety evaluation and product traceability systems and strengthen supervision to guarantee quality.

Third, integrate the reforms on health care, medical insurance and the pharmaceutical industry, speed up approval procedures for urgently-needed clinical drugs and medical equipment, and support medicine industrialization through ways such as industry funds.

Fourth, establish a modern circulation network for medicine that covers both urban and rural areas and set up national public service platforms for medicine information.

The meeting also decided to maximize the unique advantage of TCM.

First, protect the heritage of TCM and ethnic medicine, cultivate more talented TCM people and improve its curative powers.

Second, integrate modern techniques and industrial models to the development of TCM and improve the standard system.

Third, lower the entry limits for services of TCM and improve the service networks to cover both urban and rural areas.

Fourth, develop health care services related to TCM and promote the application of “Internet Plus” in TCM.

Fifth, increase investment and policy support for TCM and expand international trade and publicity of it.

In addition, the meeting decided to implement pilot projects for the innovative development of the service trade in the following two years in 10 provincial regions and cities such as Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, as well as five state-level new districts such as Harbin and Jiangbei New Area.

The projects will explore institutional improvements on eight aspects such as development models and facilitation of service trade.

First, promote the preferential corporate income tax rate of 15 percent for service enterprises featuring advanced technology and expand the scope of beneficiaries from service outsourcing firms to other high-tech service industries.

Second, set up guidance funds for innovation and development of the service trade to provide financing support to small- and medium-sized service enterprises.

Third, encourage financial institutions to innovate businesses such as supply chain financing to impose bonded supervision on service enterprises featuring advanced technology that are identified by pilot regions.