Over the past five years, China has made solid strides in building a high-level free trade port (FTP) in its southern island province of Hainan.

On April 13, 2018, China announced a decision to support Hainan in developing the whole island into a pilot free trade zone and gradually established an FTP with Chinese characteristics and global influence, making Hainan a perfect example of China's reform and opening-up in the new era.

Hainan FTP's five-year achievements exceed its past 30 years

With the FTP development, Hainan's actual use of foreign investment grew 63.2 percent, on average, annually over the past five years, and the total investment in the period exceeded that of the prior three decades, Shen Danyang, executive vice governor of Hainan, told a press briefing on Wednesday.

The strong growth came thanks to a spate of institutional innovations in foreign investment facilitation, promotion, and access, including the country's shortest negative list for foreign investment, Shen added.

Meanwhile, the GDP of Hainan Province has grown by an average of 5.3 percent annually in the past five years, successively surpassing the threshold of 500 billion yuan and 600 billion yuan, Liu Xiaoming, acting governor of Hainan, told a press briefing.

It's not just the island's GDP that is growing. The average annual per capita disposable income of urban residents increased by 5.4 percent and 8.2 percent for rural residents.

Liu said that five years on, the contributions to the GDP by the four key industries of tourism, modern services industry, high-tech industry, and tropical high-efficiency agriculture had increased to 70 percent, from 53 percent.

Implementing the new development philosophy, Hainan has cut its heavy reliance on real estate and has been speeding up the development of the modern industrial system.

The province is also seeking to build itself into an international tourism and consumption center with booming duty-free shopping over the years.

Sales of offshore duty-free shops in the province are expected to exceed 80 billion yuan this year after exceeding 60 billion yuan in 2021, Shen said. The province has increased shopping quotas and expanded categories of duty-free goods to boost duty-free shopping.

Further growth of Hainan to be in line with international standards

Over the years, more than 180 policies and measures on tariff exemptions and trade and investment facilitation have gone into effect to support the development of the Hainan FTP. China's Law on the Hainan FTP went into effect in June 2021.

Hainan is doing preparation tasks and stress tests for independent customs operations and plans to finish building 31 necessary infrastructures by the end of 2023, Liu said.

At present, there are three areas where Hainan is seen as being more effective in aligning with international high-standard economic and trade rules: professional services, medical care, and education.

Hainan has also made 134 institutional innovations in FTP construction, of which eight have been ordered by the State Council, China's cabinet, to be copied in other parts of the country.

Thanks to institutional innovations, 13 major industrial parks of the Hainan FTP, with less than two percent of the province's land area, contributed over 30 percent of Hainan's investment and over 60 percent of its foreign trade in 2022.

In the next step, Hainan will implement high-standard international economic and trade rules, and integrate into the global network of high-standard free trade zones, Liu said. It will also speed up the development of an external-oriented economy and continue to improve its business environment.

Liu added that new market entities added in the past five years exceeded that of the three decades prior.

(With input from Xinhua)