Observers and business owners have welcomed the expected initiatives, but some raised concerns about their implementation at the local level.
The four-day, closed-door plenary session ended on Thursday with a communique on a wide range of reform objectives to be completed over the next five years.
The resolution document, adopted by Central Committee members led by President Xi Jinping, refers to a wide range of policy areas related to “reforms” and “modernisation”, with a full statement expected next week.
The plenum also saw the first clear pledge from Beijing to allow migrant workers to register their residence in the cities where they work, according to Han, addressing head-on a long-time source of income disparity.
Han said the plenum agreed to prevent and rectify the use of administrative and criminal laws to intervene in economic disputes.
Acts infringing on the conduct of business, regardless of whether state-owned or private, would invite the “same responsibility, same charges and same punishment”, he said.
Tang Fangyu, deputy head of the Central Committee’s Policy Research Office, said the pledges were among “more than 300 reform goals” adopted at the plenum.
They come amid low confidence in the private sector, where investment dropped by 0.4 per cent last year, while that in the state sector rose by nearly 5 per cent.
Liu Changsong, director and founder of Beijing Mugong Law Firm, hailed the party’s support for the coming law as “an excellent move” and also welcomed the pledge to end excessive governmental interference in economic disputes.
But a Beijing-based lawyer, who has defended more than a dozen cases involving private companies in the past five years, voiced doubts over the impact of the law, noting that China’s judicial system was not independent.
“Even if we manage to draft and pass a very comprehensive law, we will face problems on the enforcement side,” she said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
She added that enacting a law would not change the trend of favouritism towards government bodies or state-owned enterprises when it came to business disputes with private companies.
Han also said that China would continue its “opening-up” policy and protect the rights of foreign companies and people in the country, and expand its use of foreign investment, while labelling a recent decline as “temporary”.
Foreign direct investment in China fell by nearly 28 per cent year on year in the January-April period, the steepest drop this century, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce, though it said this was “mainly attributable to a high base last year”.
China would work to establish a “transparent, stable, and predictable” environment for foreign companies and would continue to open up sensitive sectors like communications, internet, medicine, and culture to overseas players, Han said.
It would also further protect the “commercial secrets and intellectual property” of foreign companies so as to “vigorously safeguard the rights and interests of foreign-funded enterprises”, and would welcome more foreign service, capital and labour.
The plenum also agreed to make life in China more convenient for foreign nationals, including making e-payment systems and medical care more accessible.
More than 14.6 million foreigners visited China in the first half of the year, an increase of more than 152 per cent from a year earlier, official data showed. Of these, more than half entered via China’s expanded visa-free scheme to cover more countries.
Lan Weiguang, founder of Singapore-based water treatment firm Suntar Environmental Co Ltd, said despite the goodwill shown in the pledges, he was concerned about their implementation at local government levels.
“It is wonderful to see the party document make specific proposals on how to protect the rights of private companies. But I am worried that when it reaches the local level, some local cadres will only implement it selectively according to their local needs,” Lan said.
“I hope that the decision of the plenum can be fully implemented everywhere in China, so that foreign companies investing in China like us can have peace of mind.”
Despite spending most of their time working in cities, migrant workers with their hukou registered in their home villages have limited access to the often-better urban public services because of the rigid registration system.
“The plenum decided to introduce a system under which people register their hukou in their usual places of residence and enjoy basic public services there,” Han said.
The government has vowed to make it easier for China’s 297 million migrant workers to integrate into urban areas over the past decades.
But the official wording in previous documents was often vague, such as “guaranteeing equal rights”, and cautious, such as “experimenting with a hukou registration system based on people’s usual places of residence”.
Zheng Linyi, a researcher from the China Academy for Rural Development at Zhejiang University, said the pledge was a “big breakthrough”, meaning that the authorities were “bringing the issue to the agenda”.
“The wording implies that small towns and big cities are being equally treated when it comes to lifting hukou restrictions,” he said.
“But I think there will be some differences in implementation at the local level – major population centres will mainly be open for high-end skilled workers only, or public services would be under too much strain,” he said.
Over 66 per cent of China’s population lived in urban areas at the end of last year, but only about 48 per cent had an urban hukou, according to government figures.
Additional reporting by Zhao Ziwen
