STORY: 10 years on, FTZs set sail on new voyage as China vows to open wider
DATELINE: Sept. 29, 2023
LENGTH: 00:01:57
LOCATION: SHANGHAI, China
CATEGORY: ECONOMY

SHOTLIST:
1. various of Shanghai FTZ
2. SOUNDBITE 1 (Chinese): PEI YIGEN, Head of Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered (China)
3. SOUNDBITE 2 (Chinese): WANG WENXI, CEO of Skytech Global Ltd.
4. various of Shanghai FTZ

STORYLINE:

Friday marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of China's first pilot free trade zone in Shanghai's Pudong New Area.

According to a white paper released last week, the Shanghai FTZ had attracted 84,000 new enterprises by the end of last year, 2.35 times the number of enterprises established in the 20 years before its establishment.

SOUNDBITE 1 (Chinese): PEI YIGEN, Head of Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered (China)
"The Shanghai Free Trade Zone is of great significance to Standard Chartered. We see China as its most strategic and important market. The launch of the FTZ, with its focus on the internationalization of the RMB and the facilitation of cross-border capital and current accounts, gives foreign banks a comparatively competitive advantage. We can take advantage of our international network and the network of our customers to apply the experiences abroad to China as soon as possible."

SOUNDBITE 2 (Chinese): WANG WENXI, CEO of Skytech Global Ltd.
"In the future, we hope to take advantage of China's reform and opening-up policies to expand our business. Our current production capacity is about 300,000 units under the first-phase construction. We hope that in the next two years, we can build our own factory in the Shanghai FTZ, so as to expand our production capacity to 1 million units under the second-phase construction."

Today, China has 21 FTZs plus the Hainan Free Trade Port, which act as testing beds for China to advance reform and opening up.

From these FTZs, more than 300 institutional innovations were formulated and later replicated and promoted nationwide; about half were born or first carried out in Shanghai.

In 2022, the 21 FTZs saw exports and imports rise 14.5 percent year on year to 7.5 trillion yuan(about 1 trillion U.S. dollars), accounting for 17.8 percent of the country's total.

The utilized foreign investment in FTZs exceeded 220 billion yuan (about 30.1 billion dollars), making up 18.1 percent of the total.

Xinhua News Agency correspondents reporting from Shanghai, China.
(XHTV)