Chongqing - On January 21, Chongqing released the Work Plan on Promoting Cross-border Trade Facilitation. The plan includes 16 measures in four aspects, including reducing the overall clearance time of ports, decreasing the compliance cost of import and export, promoting the electronic certificates in import and export, and improving the efficiency of comprehensive logistics services at ports. The plan's initial goal is to reduce the regular charges for individual containers to less than $400 by the end of 2020 and cut the overall clearance time by more than half compared with 2017 by the end of 2021.

Chongqing will promote the application of the "pre-declaration" mode to optimize the whole process of customs collection and management.

In terms of decreasing the overall clearance time of ports, Chongqing will promote the application of the "pre-declaration" mode, improve the efficiency of inspection, implement convenient measures for inspection and quarantine, and optimize the whole process of customs collection and management.

At the same time, in terms of reducing the compliance cost of import and export, Chongqing will further reduce the export cost of enterprises and strengthen the supervision and management of port charges.

In terms of improving the efficiency of comprehensive port logistics services, Chongqing will open the "Shanghai-Chongqing direct express line," speed up the transfer of imported goods and accelerate the construction of Chongqing smart port. Among them, the "Shanghai-Chongqing direct express line" will try to control the overall time of water transportation between Chongqing port and Shanghai port to around ten days after launching and 12 days after loading (except exceptional cases).

In addition, Chongqing port will work with Chongqing Customs to strengthen policy publicity and training, formulate a series of policies on optimizing the port business environment based on the work plan, and ensure the implementation of the tasks and objectives of the work plan.