The State Council recently issued a circular to stress new measures to regulate random inspection on market and government departments.

As the reform to streamline administration and delegate powers to lower-level governments continues, the government is managing to regulate the progress with supervisory innovation.

Well-managed random inspection

According to the circular, random inspection is not a casual check at will. It must be well-managed with the following four measures:

First, a list must be provided to inform the public what the government is inspecting, how it will inspect, and the result.

Second, it must set up a “double random” mechanism, which means a random pickup of inspectors and a random selection of targets.

Third, it requires relevant government departments to inspect at a reasonable range, which means the regular inspection should take into consideration local economic and social development.

Fourth, it must link the inspection results to social credits of market players and strengthen punishment on violators to increase penalties.

From quantity to quality

The government regards streamlining administration and delegating powers to lower-level governments as the top priority of the reform to the administrative and economic systems.

To date, departments of the State Council have canceled or delegated 537 administrative examination and approval items, two years ahead of the schedule that the government set to cut off one-third of the items.

Local governments also have implemented the policy as the canceled or delegated items account for more than 50 percent of the total items. In some provinces, all non-administrative approval items have been abolished.

As reform continues, quality becomes significant as many departments under the State Council have tried to improve efficiency by reducing the time spent on examination and approval, establishing the online examination and approval mechanism, and strengthening in-(Q: should “in” here be “before” ?)and-after inspection and management.

The highlight is commercial system reform. It allows people to get a business license before receiving a business permit, reforms the registered capital payment, and turns the annual inspection into an annual report. That stimulates the market, which in the first half of 2015 witnessed an increase of 6.851 million market entities and almost 2 million newly-registered enterprises.

“The last mile”

According to a survey carried out by the World Bank on the world business environment in 2015, China ranks 90th among 189 economies, mainly because of an overwhelming number of administrative examination and approval items.

In an effort to change the situation, the government has carried out reform by streamlining administration and delegating powers to lower-levels. But the government departments used to issue orders and permits, so the streamlining and delegating might be difficult or even a burden to them. Thus, the “last mile” is also critical for the success of the reform.

According to the State Council, reform will not only simply cut administrative examination and approval items but also focus on delegating powers to lower-level governments, regulation and service.

The State Council has planned that before the end of September, State Council departments should simplify the process and improve efficiency of administrative examination and approval, and promote joint administrative examination and approval among different departments and online administrative examination and approval before the end of this year.

In addition, big data, cloud computing and other Internet technologies would be applied to explore the “Internet plus regulation” mode.