The 2022 business environment evaluation of the top ten Chinese seaborne container ports was recently unveiled. Qingdao scored the most points and ranked among the optimal grade.

Since the beginning of 2022, Qingdao has comprehensively launched the cross-border trade facilitation campaign, aimed at bolstering higher-level opening up of the entire city. The Qingdao Municipal Port Affairs Office has given play to its leadership, rolled out pragmatic measures to ensure safe and smooth port operation, enhance land-sea linkage, improve inland services, focus on easing business burdens and pursue steady progress in foreign trade, established an interactive system that involves the dominance of special groups, cross-department cooperation and coordination between districts or county-level cities, attracted the participation of many municipal departments regarding the customs, maritime affairs, immigration inspection, port affairs, transportation, business affairs, taxation and foreign exchange, and witnessed an increasingly well-developed system for jointly shaping the business environment in Qingdao’s ports. The Qingdao Municipal Port Affairs Office, the Qingdao Customs and the Qingdao Area of China (Shandong) Pilot Free Trade Zone took the lead in China in establishing the direct link service system for cross-border trade facilitation, marking a new breakthrough in the reform of cross-border trade facilitation. With the constantly improving intelligent Qingdao-port.net, Qingdao has become the first Chinese port to realize 100% in paperless inspection, goods concentration and inspection fulfillment, and improved the inspection efficiency by over 30%. The Qingdao Port globally ranks first in terms of berthing efficiency. The Qingdao Customs has established and improved the “11+1” customs integration system along the Yellow River Basin, put in place a new export inspection mode featuring “land-sea linkage, direct sea-railway transport”, which can shorten customs clearance from 20 hours to 3 hours and reduce the domestic transportation cost by 20%; the innovative “intelligent remote inspection and quarantine” for regular liners can save more than 1 hour for each voyage in the port; the direct transshipment mode for imported ore products can reduce customs clearance by 2 days.  (Yu Bo)

Qingdao takes the lead in China in establishing the direct link service system for cross-border trade facilitation.  By Sun Jintao