City a gateway to land-sea connectivity

Qingdao, a coastal city of East China's Shandong province, is continuing to take great strides in enhancing its role as a hub city along major economic corridors such as the New Eurasian Land Bridge while mapping out plans to boost maritime cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Expanding the market

The Qingdao-based China-SCO Local Economic and Trade Cooperation Demonstration Area, or SCODA, facilitates land-sea connectivity and common development between East and West, and by serving as a significant logistics supply chain solution for trade between Shandong and SCO member countries, it has opened rail routes to cities such as Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Almaty in Kazakhstan, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, Baku in Azerbaijan and Minsk in Belarus.

Through the first eight months of this year, the number of China-Europe freight train trips operated by SCODA's multimodal transport logistics center reached 682, up 30.4 percent year-on-year. The demonstration area also introduced China's first one-stop public service platform for trade and economic cooperation with SCO member countries at the local level, providing users with comprehensive services that integrate trade, customs clearance, logistics and finance throughout the entire process and value chain.

The 2.0 version of the platform, launched in June, focuses on sectors such as exports, local currency settlement, barter trade and mutual recognition of regulations. It has attracted about 5,000 domestic and foreign companies in 27 industries, completed more than 6,000 customs clearance applications and realized a customs declaration amount of more than 20 billion yuan ($2.74 billion).

Zhang Dong, deputy director of SCODA's administrative committee, said the SCO International Investment and Trade Expo held in Qingdao in June bridged international trade, business cooperation and exchanges between domestic companies and SCO member countries. The expo attracted 330 companies and institutions from 34 countries and regions, exhibiting more than 10,000 characteristic products from SCO member countries. The total transaction reached approximately 1 billion yuan.

FTZ boosts trade

Over the past four years, the Qingdao area of the China (Shandong) Pilot Free Trade Zone, a high-level platform for the city's opening-up, has introduced 285 innovative policies to boost economic development, cross-border e-commerce and foreign trade. Actual use of foreign capital in the zone increased from $533 million to $850 million from 2020 to 2022, with an average annual growth rate of 26.28 percent. From 2019 to 2022, the total trade volume of goods in the Qingdao FTZ surged from 97.5 billion yuan to 201.3 billion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of 27.33 percent.

The Qingdao FTZ has explored new models of cross-border e-commerce and pioneered the 9810 export tax refund with the concept of "refund upon warehouse entry". In 2022, the import volume of cross-border e-commerce exceeded 5.2 billion yuan, accounting for 71.4 percent of Shandong's total. It also achieved $7.77 billion in international income and expenditure in offshore trade in 2022, accounting for more than 80 percent of Shandong's total.

The Qingdao FTZ is the first in the country to achieve paperless operations for bulk cargo electronic bills of lading for imports, with a customs clearance time of only 22 minutes, increasing overall efficiency by 43.9 percent. In addition, it has conducted pilot projects for cross-border RMB settlements. As of the end of June, Qingdao had 384 branches of 47 banks that have launched cross-border RMB settlement services, benefiting more than 15,000 foreign-related enterprises from some 150 countries and regions.

Shipping routes

Shandong's Qingdao Port is committed to enhancing the dual-circulation new development paradigm under the Belt and Road Initiative, constructing the Northeast Asia international shipping hub and ensuring stability of the global supply chain. The port added 15 new container shipping routes, four new inland ports and opened two searail intermodal train services in the first half of this year. The sea-rail intermodal container volume reached 1.15 million twenty-foot equivalent units, an increase of 18.6 percent over the same period of 2022.

Since the beginning of the year, Qingdao Port has added 10 shipping routes under the BRI, and container volumes in countries and regions involved in the BRI have maintained double-digit growth.

Enterprise service center

As China's first comprehensive business service platform focusing on economic and trade cooperation under the framework of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the RCEP Shandong Enterprise Service Center started operation on June 29, 2021.

Through a government-led and market-oriented approach, it is a pioneer in business services within the RCEP. By cooperating with customs, taxation and trade promotion organizations as well as administrative approval departments, the facility, which includes 10 centers and 18 service windows, gathers resources from various links in the trade chain and channels them into three main sections: public services, value-added services and supporting services.

Other platforms

With the theme of "Harmonious Coexistence in the Ocean Decade", the 2023 East Asia Marine Cooperation Platform Qingdao Forum held June 27-29 in Qingdao West Coast New Area brought together leaders of 96 marine organizations from 51 countries and regions and nearly 400 ocean experts, economists and cultural scholars to discuss such issues as marine ecological protection, disaster prevention and reduction, and international cooperation and governance.

Qingdao is also expanding its "circle of friends" through cultural exchanges. As an example, the Qingdao International Invitation Exhibition of Watercolor at the Qingdao Publishing Art Museum from Aug 27 to Sept 26 showcased more than 40 watercolor works from 24 countries, and allowed local residents to enhance their understanding of international art while promoting mutual respect and harmonious coexistence among different civilizations.

The Qingdao Jiaodong International Airport. CHINA DAILY

The Qingdao port of Shandong Port Group. CHINA DAILY

The Qingdao SCODA Pearl International Expo Center. CHINA DAILY

Qingdao is an attractive coastal city of East China's Shandong province. ZHANG JIANHUA/FOR CHINA DAILY