Shou Xiaoli:
Thank you. Next, I'll give the floor to Mr. Pu Chun.
Pu Chun:
Friends from the press, good morning. "Integrating domestic and foreign trade and fostering dual-circulation development" is an inherent requirement for China to give full play to the advantages of its super-large market and expand high-level opening-up.
Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, the market regulation authorities, following the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, have fully implemented the decisions and arrangements of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, and continued to deepen reform, optimize regulation and improve services, providing strong support for fostering a new development paradigm. We have continued to refine the business environment and stimulate the vitality of market entities to improve the market system and promote stable economic growth long into the future. We have worked steadfastly to consolidate and develop the public sector and encourage, support, and guide the development of the non-public sector, pressed ahead with the reform of market access, operation, and exit systems, and fully boosted entrepreneurship and innovation dynamism across the society. The number of market entities has reached a historic high of 150 million, and the number of self-employed individuals has hit a new level of 100 million. This has helped lay the most important economic foundation for promoting development, stabilizing employment, ensuring people's livelihood, and balancing development and security, as well as accumulate the most valuable, reliable, and predictable strategic resources for steady and long-term economic growth.
We have thoroughly implemented the fair competition policies and prioritized safeguarding fair competition to give play to the role of market mechanisms and build a unified domestic market. We have resolutely implemented the decisions and deployments of the CPC Central Committee about fair competition policies, coordinated efforts to improve competition rules and strengthened related law enforcement, and integrated online and offline supervision in a coordinated way. We have paid more attention to following the general rules of the market, intensifying law-based measures, and preventing and defusing risks of competition disorder to effectively maintain fair market order.
We have comprehensively enhanced the protection of consumers' rights and interests and regulated the market to improve people's well-being. We have firmly adopted the "four strictest measures (the strictest standards, supervision, penalties, and accountability)" and reinforced the whole-chain oversight in key areas, which has steadily bettered food and drug safety. Supervision has been stepped up over the quality of vaccines against novel coronavirus and pandemic-related products, as well as the prices of goods critical to people's livelihoods, to serve the national anti-pandemic efforts. Channels for consumers to make complaints and reports have been smoothed, and efforts have been redoubled to address people's trivial but essential matters in their daily lives, thus creating a safe and reassuring market environment for expanding domestic demand.
We have worked hard to build China into a manufacturer of quality and focused on promoting quality improvement for high-quality development. We have established and improved policies for quality betterment and steadily bolstered the quality of products and services. The quality infrastructure, including measurement standards, certification and recognition, and inspection and testing, has been refined and has become an important part of the market system. This has promoted efficient operation and fair trading in the market and served as significant, fundamental support for scientific and technological innovation, industrial upgrading, green development, and trade facilitation.
Friends from the press, it takes great responsibility to well regulate such a super-large market with an economic size of 114 trillion yuan, 158 million market entities, and 1.4 billion consumers. On the new journey of building a modern socialist country in all respects, we will always follow the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and apply the new development philosophy in full, in the right way, and in all fields of endeavor. We will take a strategic perspective to cultivate a new development paradigm, promote high-quality development and facilitate common prosperity, continue to energize the market, and strive to maintain the market order by pioneering forth and making innovations while upholding what is proven successful so as to contribute to the prosperous, sound, and orderly development of China's super-large market. Thank you!