Guangzhou's legislature recently passed rules on optimizing the city's business environment, the first local stipulation to guide work related to attracting investment and regulating market economy.

The rules not only include innovative practices in government services, financing loans and policy implementation, but also pay attention to the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises.

"Facilitation and rule of law are two particularly prominent factors in Guangzhou's reform of business environment," said Zhang Yueguo, dean of the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences.

In recent years, Guangzhou has focused on improving the satisfaction of market players, promoting a modern and international business environment, and taking the optimization of the business environment as the city's priority to deepen reforms.

In the field of building permits, Guangzhou took the lead in reforming and restructuring the approval process for simple and low-risk social investment projects, reducing the original procedures from 31 to six.

In terms of tax and fee reduction, the burden has been reduced by more than 70 billion yuan ($10.49 billion) for enterprises this year.

Guangzhou Development District is Guangdong's first experimental zone for the reform and innovation in the business environment.

The district established Guangzhou's first administrative approval bureau in March 2019, with one-stop, one-seal, integrated approval authority.

Liu Lizi, deputy dean of the Urban Strategy Research Institute at the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, was deeply impressed by the district's one-seal management approval.

She said the one-stop examination and approval agency realizes "one window for unified acceptance, one set of drawings for construction application, and one system for unified management and approval".

"Behind this are the data sharing and authority integration of multiple items, which enhance cooperation among various departments."

Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission released the China Business Environment Report 2020, and Guangzhou was selected as a benchmark city in all 18 indicator fields.

Guangzhou ranked first in terms of the comprehensive business environment among major cities across the country, according to another recent national business environment evaluation issued by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

A high-quality business environment has brought active market investment.

In the past two years, Guangzhou has added 93 investment projects from Fortune 500 companies alone. In the first half of this year, there were 2.46 million market entities in the city, a year-on-year increase of 13.08 percent.

Li Haizhou, director of the Guangzhou development and reform commission, said Guangzhou will give full play to the role of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and take the overall optimization of the business environment as a priority to promote modernization.

"Efforts will be made in three areas: focusing on market-oriented configuration reform, the construction of a social credit system and a legal business environment," Li said.

Li said that Guangzhou will minimize direct government intervention in market activities, and focus on the circulation of the five major factors: land, labor, capital, technology and data.

"We will actively explore and carry out innovative and differentiated reform measures for the registration and confirmation of rights and use of transactions, strive for national support for pilot projects and build an allocation center for global resources."

At the same time, Guangzhou will construct a social credit system, integrate multi-dimensional data sources such as the internet and finance, improve data timeliness and quality, consolidate the application foundation, and accelerate the construction of a new credit-based regulatory mechanism.

Li said that Guangzhou will innovate the use of trust-based approval to reduce the number of procedures, establish credit classification, highlight the role of equity assets, and promote credit services in the real economy.

In terms of building a friendly business environment, the city is to speed up the process of legislation, improve the institutional system involving the business environment, strengthen the construction of procedural regulations, and ensure fair rules, opportunities and rights.

"We are striving to take greater strides in linking internationally accepted business rules, accelerate the construction of a world-class business environment suitable for openness and innovation. We hope to build a stable, fair, transparent and predictable business environment," Li said.