China continues to provide a better business environment for global enterprises

A meeting convened in Beijing has sent out information indicating that China's business environment is getting increasingly better.

In rankings for 190 economies in the world, China's business environment rose to 31st place in 2020 from 91st in 2012, according to statistics released at the meeting held on July 10 by the Development Research Center (DRC) of the State Council.

Aerial photo taken on Feb. 24, 2020 shows the Haizhu wetland and the Canton Tower in the distance in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province. [Xinhua/Xie Huiqiang]

The number of business entities of various types in China stood at 144 million in 2020, compared with 55 million in 2012, the meeting revealed.

Over the past few years, China has taken effective measures to stimulate market vitality and creativity in the whole of society, bolstering the endogenous power driving economic growth.

The country has made major headway in carrying forward reforms of its administrative approval system, greatly reduced the number of items requiring administrative approval, and eliminated administrative permits, relieving the burden on market entities.

It has reduced the time needed for approving construction projects to within 120 work days, and cut 80 vocational qualifications concerning a total of 185 professions.

The country has built a unified governance platform backed by the Internet, gaining valuable experience such as "management in one unified network" and the City Brain system for construction of smart cities.

Thanks to these efforts, a range of problems, including misplacement, abuse, or absence of government functions, has been effectively addressed.

China has remained the best global destination for investment for several years in a row. Last year, foreign direct investment into the Chinese mainland, in actual use, rose 6.2 percent, bucking the downward trend in global foreign investment.

Of the 144 million market entities that China has, 200,000 are high-tech enterprises and 180,000 are medium- and small- sized technological companies. Their expenditure on R&D accounted for 76.2 percent of entire spending.

In addition, Chinese applicants filed the highest number of international patent applications in the world through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

Zhang Gong, head of the State Administration for Market Regulation, attributed the vigorous development of the market entities to their strong ability to adapt to changes in the market, the determination of entrepreneurs to forge ahead, and the hard work and wisdom of labor resources.

According to Wang Jun, head of the State Taxation Administration, the number of taxpaying enterprises reporting an increase in profits rose to 8.347 million last year from 5.527 million in 2016, an average annual increase of 10.9 percent.

Meanwhile, the average annual profit of key enterprise taxpayers which made a tax payment of more than 5 million yuan rose 7.4 percent; the return on net assets ratio of these enterprises increased from 7 percent in 2016 to 9.05 percent in 2020 and the debt-to-asset ratio decreased from 58.6 percent to 55 percent in the same period.

"This indicates that the profitability of the key enterprise taxpayers and their resilience against risks are both becoming stronger," Wang said.