Chongqing - On June 1, Chongqing hosted a promotion event for the UN Convention on Negotiable Cargo Documents (NCD) ahead of its official opening for signature in Accra, Ghana, later this year. The event explored how the convention could help foster a more inclusive and efficient global trading system.

Adopted by the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 15, 2025, the convention followed Chinese proposals submitted to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law in 2019 based on railway bill-of-lading pilot programs tested in Chongqing.

The convention seeks to extend negotiable-document functions beyond maritime shipping to rail and road cargo transport. Ocean bills of lading can serve as documents of title, allowing goods in transit to be pledged as collateral for financing, while railway and road waybills traditionally lacked that status. 

Chongqing launched its railway bill-of-lading pilot in 2017 and later developed multimodal “single-document” bills covering combined rail-sea transport under one settlement process. By the end of 2025, the city had issued more than 47,000 such bills, facilitating nearly 1.1 billion yuan (about 153 million U.S. dollars) in financing.

The convention reflects a broader pattern in which local policy experiments developed in Chongqing are entering multilateral frameworks through the United Nations systems. UNESCO added Chongqing to its Creative Cities Network as a City of Design in 2023, while the World Meteorological Organization has cited the city’s disaster early-warning practices under its Early Warnings for All initiative.