State Council: Cultivate and strengthen new consumption, develop new models such as "Internet +" medical services, digital education, etc

The Zhitong Finance APP learned that on August 3, the State Council issued opinions on promoting the high-quality development of service consumption. It proposed to accelerate the digital empowerment of life services, build new consumption scenarios such as smart business districts, smart blocks, and smart stores, develop new models such as "Internet +" medical services, digital education, etc., accelerate the layout of new formats such as unmanned retail stores, self-pickup cabinets, cloud cabinets, and support the development of e-sports, social e-commerce, live e-commerce, etc. Accelerate the construction and upgrading of information consumption experience centers and launch a batch of new information consumption projects. Carry out pilot projects for digital home construction to better meet residents' needs for intelligent home product services and online social services.

Cultivate and strengthen new service formats such as health check-ups, consultations, and management. Promote the development of "Internet + medical health", achieve the interconnection of medical data as soon as possible, gradually improve the medical insurance payment policies for "Internet +" medical services. Encourage the development of commercial health insurance products that meet diversified and personalized health protection needs. Further promote the development of medical care integration, support medical institutions in providing medical care integration services. Support the development of traditional Chinese medicine old-brand enterprises, improve the level of health preservation, rehabilitation, and recuperation services. Strengthen the functions of retail pharmacies in health promotion, nutrition, and health care.

The original text is as follows:

Opinions of the State Council on Promoting the High-Quality Development of Service Consumption

State Council Document No. 18 [2024]

To the people's governments of all provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the Central Government, ministries and commissions of the State Council, and directly affiliated institutions of the State Council:

To optimize and expand service supply, unleash the potential of service consumption, better meet the personalized, diversified, and quality service consumption needs of the people, the following opinions are now proposed.

I. General Requirements

Guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, fully implement the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and the second and third plenary sessions of the 20th Central Committee, comprehensively implement the new development concept, accelerate the construction of a new development pattern, coordinate the expansion of domestic demand and deepen the supply-side structural reform, open up the service industry, focus on improving service quality, enriching consumption scenarios, optimizing the consumption environment, stimulate the endogenous dynamic of service consumption through innovation, cultivate new growth points for service consumption, and provide strong support for high-quality economic development.

II. Tap the Potential of Basic Consumption

(I) Catering and accommodation consumption. Improve the quality of catering services, cultivate famous dishes, snacks, chefs, and restaurants. Encourage the inheritance and promotion of traditional cooking techniques and culinary culture at the local level, cultivate clusters of characteristic snack industries, create "food towns" and "food villages". Organize a series of activities under the "Chinese Food Expo" to support local activities promoting consumption of characteristic catering. Encourage internationally renowned catering brands to open their first stores and flagship stores in China. Improve the quality of accommodation services and the level of foreign-related services, cultivate a number of mid-to-high-end hotel brands and homestay brands, support the integration of accommodation industry with tourism, health preservation, study tours, and other formats. Legally revitalize idle rural houses and collectively constructed land, develop rural hotels, guesthouses, and homestay services.

(II) Household services consumption. Support the development of employee-owned household service companies, smooth the career development channels for household service practitioners. Deepen the action of connecting household service labor services, promote household services into communities, and increase the supply of household services. Implement the action of upgrading the skills of household service workers, promote the construction of household service brands, and create women's household service brands. Guide the formulation of household service conventions, optimize the household service credit information platform and the "household service credit check" function, and promote the electronic version of the "home service certificate" (三) Elderly care and childcare consumption. Vigorously develop the silver economy, promote the development of intelligent and healthy elderly care industry, promote barrier-free construction of public spaces, consumption venues, etc., and improve the aging level of homes. Accelerate the improvement of a coordinated home and community institution, a combination of medical care and health care, elderly care service system, carry out actions to enhance basic elderly care services at home and in the community, and promote vocational colleges to strengthen talent training. Increase the supply of elderly care and childcare services through multiple channels, support the construction of new, renovated, and expanded elderly care and childcare institutions using vacant spaces in accordance with laws and regulations, and promote the reduction of operating costs. Combine the transformation of old residential areas, complete community construction, community life circle construction, and urban community embedded service facilities construction to optimize the layout of service facilities such as housekeeping, elderly care, childcare, and meal assistance. Strictly implement the synchronous planning, construction, acceptance, and delivery requirements of newly built residential areas and supporting elderly care and childcare service facilities. Implement the pricing of water, electricity, gas, and heating for elderly care and childcare institutions according to residential living prices. Support financial institutions in optimizing risk management, and actively provide financial products and services suitable for the characteristics of inclusive elderly care and childcare institution projects.

Three, Stimulate the vitality of improvement-type consumption

(Four) Cultural and entertainment consumption. Carry out national cultural and tourism consumption promotion activities in depth, continue to implement the "Hundred Cities, Hundred Districts" cultural and tourism consumption action plan. Strengthen the protection and inheritance of intangible cultural heritage, develop key cultural and creative projects with regional and ethnic characteristics. Expand the supply of cultural performances, improve approval efficiency, and increase the number of performances. Enrich the supply of films, support the distribution of films through differentiated models such as branch line distribution, and promote associated consumption of movies. Improve the quality of online literature, online performances, online games, radio and television, and online audiovisual, deepen the governance of multi-layered television fees and complex operations, accelerate the development of ultra-high-definition television, and encourage the development of new formats such as immersive experiences, script entertainment, digital art, and online broadcasting.

(Five) Tourism consumption. Strengthen the construction of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities, promote the innovative and standardized development of national-level night cultural and tourism consumption gathering areas, implement the beautiful life vacation leisure project and rural tourism quality improvement and efficiency enhancement action. Promote the integrated development of business, travel, culture, sports, and health, enhance project experience and interactivity, launch various types of characteristic tourism products, encourage the development of new formats such as cruise yachts, RV camping, low-altitude flights, and support the integration of "music + tourism," "performance + tourism," "event + tourism," and other formats. Increase the operation of silver-haired tourism special trains, renovate the carriages to be elderly-friendly and comfortable, enrich tourism routes and service supply. Encourage localities to formulate and implement policies such as preferential ticket prices for scenic spots and free admission in the off-season. Improve the quality of transportation services, improve services such as multi-level transfers and car rentals, and facilitate passenger travel. Optimize entry policies and consumption environment, accelerate the resumption of flight frequencies, provide diversified payment services, study the expansion of visa-free countries, and deepen cultural tourism year activities.

(Six) Sports consumption. Activate idle venue resources, guide social forces to lawfully and regulatively transform old factories, warehouses, old commercial facilities, etc., and increase sports consumption venues. Encourage the hosting of various sports events, create event brands with independent intellectual property rights, bid for or introduce influential international top-level events, and cultivate professional operation teams. Guide various regions to launch distinctive mass sports events. Actively develop ice and snow sports and continue to promote the popularization and development of ice and snow sports nationwide Deepen the pilot work of promoting sports consumption and cultivate a number of national sports industry and sports tourism development carriers.

(Seven) Education and training consumption. Promote the opening up of high-level colleges and universities, research institutions, and social organizations to quality educational resources to meet the diverse and personalized learning needs of the society. Promote the improvement of vocational education quality and efficiency, build high-level vocational schools and specialties. Promote social training institutions to enhance service quality in response to public demand. Guide schools to introduce non-disciplinary high-quality public welfare after-school services by purchasing services from third-party institutions with corresponding qualifications in accordance with relevant regulations. Encourage cooperation in high-level education with internationally renowned universities in China.

(Eight) Residential service consumption. Encourage property service companies with conditions to collaborate with elderly care, childcare, catering, housekeeping, and other enterprises to develop a "property service + life service" model. Promote new models such as intelligent security, smart parking, intelligent access control, etc., to enhance community service levels and residential experiences. Cultivate leading enterprises that provide one-stop, standardized products and services such as renovation design, customized whole-house installation, and smart home. Encourage regions with conditions to support residents in house decoration and partial renovation.

Four, Cultivate and Expand New Consumption

(Nine) Digital consumption. Accelerate the digital empowerment of life services, build new consumption scenarios such as smart business districts, smart blocks, smart stores, develop new models such as "Internet +" medical services, digital education, accelerate the layout of new formats such as unmanned retail stores, self-pickup cabinets, cloud cabinets, support the development of e-sports, social e-commerce, live e-commerce, etc. Accelerate the construction and upgrade of information consumption experience centers, launch a batch of new information consumption projects. Carry out pilot projects for digital home construction to better meet residents' needs for intelligent home product services and online social services.

(Ten) Green consumption. Establish and improve green low-carbon service standards, certification, labeling systems, improve green design standards, enhance the market acceptance and corporate benefits of green services. Promote the application of advanced green low-carbon technologies, improve energy and water efficiency labeling management, enhance the level of greenization in home decoration, travel, tourism, express delivery, and other fields.

(Eleven) Health consumption. Cultivate and expand new service formats such as health check-ups, consultations, management, etc. Promote the development of "Internet + medical health", achieve interoperability of medical data as soon as possible, gradually improve the medical insurance payment policies for "Internet +" medical services. Encourage the development of commercial health insurance products that meet diversified and personalized health protection needs. Further promote the development of medical care integration, support medical institutions to provide medical care integration services. Support the development of traditional Chinese medicine old-brand enterprises, enhance the level of health preservation, rehabilitation, and health care services. Strengthen the functions of retail pharmacies in health promotion, nutrition, and health care.

Five, Enhance the Momentum of Service Consumption

(Twelve) Innovate service consumption scenarios. Carry out actions to improve service consumption and benefit the people. Conduct a series of consumption promotion activities around key areas that are close to people's lives, have great potential demand, and strong driving effects. Promote the transformation and upgrading of pedestrian streets, accelerate the construction of convenient one-hour urban life circles, improve the county-level commercial system, improve the urban-rural service consumption network, enrich rural life service supply, and enhance service supply capacity and consumption levels.

(Thirteen) Strengthen the cultivation of service consumption brands. Explore the implementation of high-quality service commitments. Support service industry enterprises to strengthen brand cultivation, operation, and protection, give play to the leading role of Chinese time-honored brands and characteristic traditional brands, and cultivate a group of service industry brands with good service quality, strong innovation momentum, and strong driving effects (Six) Optimize the service consumption environment

(Fifteen) Strengthen service consumption supervision. Strengthen cross-departmental joint supervision, crack down on false advertising, online fraud, information leakage, etc. Encourage the establishment of consumer rights protection service stations in communities, shopping malls, scenic spots, and platform companies to facilitate the resolution of consumer disputes at the source. Explore the mechanism for handling malicious claims, crack down on extortion under the guise of complaints and reports, and safeguard a good business environment and the legitimate rights and interests of operators.

(Sixteen) Guide honest and compliant operations. Relying on the "Credit China" website and the national enterprise credit information disclosure system, launch the "Credit Information" section, strengthen the collection and disclosure of credit information such as registration, administrative licensing, and administrative penalties of relevant operating entities, and guide more operating entities to be honest and trustworthy. Strengthen service quality monitoring and evaluation, improve the evaluation index system, regularly release monitoring and evaluation results, and encourage third-party organizations to conduct service consumption evaluations.

(Seventeen) Improve service consumption standards. Optimize the layout of service industry standardization, cultivate service industry standardization brands. Formulate and revise relevant standards for service consumption, improve standards in areas such as culture, tourism, catering and accommodation, housekeeping services, elderly care and childcare, home decoration, and business services, develop new consumption standards such as digital consumption, green consumption, and health consumption. Strengthen the construction of certification systems in the service consumption field.

(Seven) Strengthen policy support

(Eighteen) Strengthen financial, tax, and financial support. Encourage regions with conditions to utilize existing funding channels and actively guide social investment, support digital empowerment of life service, cultivation of industrial clusters and agglomeration areas, construction of public service platforms, and standardization construction. Encourage government financing guarantee institutions to provide financing and credit support to eligible service industry small and micro enterprises and individual industrial and commercial households. Guide financial institutions to optimize credit products, provide differentiated services, increase credit support for key areas of service consumption in accordance with the principles of risk control and commercial sustainability, and increase the supply of financial products to meet the needs of new consumption formats such as the sharing economy. Promote deep integration of commercial health insurance and health management, enrich the supply of commercial long-term care insurance. Implement special additional deductions for personal income tax for childcare for children under 3 years old, children's education, and supporting the elderly.

(Nineteen) Strengthen the support of the talent team. Continuously improve relevant discipline majors and training programs, strengthen the integration of industry and education, school-enterprise cooperation, and the combination of work and study, and cultivate service industry talents in short supply through "order-based" training. Encourage ordinary universities, vocational colleges, and enterprises to jointly build open regional industry-education integration practice centers, cultivate compound, applied, and skilled service industry talents. Improve diversified evaluation methods such as professional title evaluation, vocational qualification assessment, and occupational skill level recognition for service industry talents. Encourage local governments to issue a directory and recognition criteria for "high-precision and scarce" talents in key areas of the service industry, and improve preferential policies for settlement, housing purchase, children's enrollment, and spouse employment Improve the development of new service industry professions and occupational standards. Carry out the Life Service Recruitment Season activities to expand the talent supply.

(20) Enhance statistical monitoring capabilities. Optimize the statistical monitoring methods for the service consumption market, improve the statistical monitoring system. Strengthen the collection and analysis of service consumption data for forecasting, and carry out the statistics of service retail sales. Expand the sources of statistical monitoring data, increase cooperation with third-party payment platforms and research institutions, and explore the construction of suitable application models.

All regions, departments, and relevant units must resolutely implement the decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, and promote the implementation and refinement of various tasks. The Ministry of Commerce, together with relevant departments, should play a coordinating role in promoting the development of service consumption, strengthen overall planning, formulate special policy measures, and jointly promote the high-quality development of service consumption.

State Council

July 29, 2024

(This article is edited from the official website of the State Council; edited by Li Fo for Wise Finance.)