Lin-gang Special Area in Shanghai to accelerate cross-border business efforts

Lin-gang Special Area, the part of the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone included in August 2019, will accelerate its efforts in facilitating companies' cross-border businesses by better addressing the major development targets, demands and various problems, said Yuan Guohua, Party secretary and chairman of Lingang Group - a local State-owned enterprise responsible for the development of Lin-gang.

Yuan made such comments during an open group meeting held by the Shanghai delegation to the second session of the 14th National People's Congress on Wednesday.

Lin-gang has been speeding up to formulate lists to categorize general and important cross-border data. The first lists have been initially completed, including more than 20 scenarios covering remote diagnosis of intelligent connected cars, investment and research information of mutual fund market, management of multinational corporation groups and biomedical clinical trials and research and development. They will be released soon upon further demonstration and argumentation, said Yuan.

Meanwhile, Lin-gang will align with international high-standard economic and trade rules such as the Digital Economic Partnership Agreement and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership at a faster pace, said Yuan.

In specific, efforts will be made to set up a DEPA cooperation demonstration zone and explore building a cross-border electronic invoice interoperability platform. Lin-gang will connect with the international digital identification system to experiment with the cross-border mutual recognition of digital identity. The application scenarios of electronic bills of lading should be expanded. The area should make more efforts to establish a blockchain cross-chain public service platform and actively participate in the country's pilot program of shipping trade digitalization, he said.

As explained by Yuan, Lin-gang is already accelerating the infrastructure construction for cross-border data flow.

The area has been promoting the construction of new submarine cable landing stations and directly connected submarine cables. It has been exploring the construction of functional data centers for international offshore data business. The development of new forms of data businesses, such as international data cloud services, computing power services and offshore data outsourcing, has also picked up pace in Lin-gang, said Yuan.

A public service platform for cross-border data flow is in the pipeline to provide companies with one-stop services while ensuring cross-border data security, added Yuan.

According to Yuan, nearly 60 companies specializing in cross-border data flow businesses have settled down in Lin-gang's international data economy industrial park, which was officially launched in late October.