Full Text: Report on the Work of the Government(4)

III. Major Tasks for 2014

To deliver a good performance in the work of the government this year, we need to deepen reform so as to create powerful impetus, carry out structural adjustment as our main priority, and make improving people's wellbeing our fundamental goal. We need to take a holistic approach, focus on key areas, and achieve solid progress.

1. Making breakthroughs in reform in important areas

Reform is the top priority for the government's work this year. We will focus on economic structural reform, advance it on different fronts in a targeted way in light of different conditions, take key measures that will have an overall impact, strive to make substantive progress and reap more benefits reform.

We will deepen reform of the administrative system.

We will further streamline administration and delegate more power to lower-level governments. This is a revolution the government imposes on itself. This year, we will cancel or delegate to lower-level governments an additional 200 plus items requiring State Council review and approval.

We will deepen reform of the investment approval system, abolish or simplify preliminary review and approval procedures, give businesses full power over their investment decisions, and make it easy to make investments and start businesses.

We will introduce a system to list all items over which government review and approval are required and release the list to the public. No items not on the list will be subject to government review and approval. We will also comprehensively sort out items requiring nongovernmental review and approval.

We will basically complete the reform of government bodies at the provincial, municipal and county levels, and continue to reform public institutions. We will reform the business registration system nationwide and carry out registration of subscribed capital. Issuing an operating permit before a license, which was the practice in the past, will be replaced with the practice of license first, operating permit second. Annual inspections of businesses will be replaced by annual reporting to incentivize market actors.

Stronger oversight will be exercised over delegated matters when they are being handled and after they have been handled. We will attach equal importance to both delegating power and strengthening oversight, establish a mechanism of coordinating management between government bodies at both the same and different levels, and ensure that both responsibility and power are delegated together and that relaxing control and strengthening oversight go hand in hand.