The State Council, China's Cabinet, unveiled a guideline on Aug 3 aimed at boosting high-quality development of service consumption to release consumption potential.

The guideline focuses on three key areas: improving the quality of services, creating more diverse consumption scenarios, and upgrading the overall spending environment.

The goal is to drive service consumption through innovation and to develop new areas of growth. As these aspects affect many parts of our daily lives, let's explore the details together.

Catering

Catering consumption:

- Enhance the quality of catering services and promote renowned dishes, snacks, chefs, and restaurants.

- Encourage local regions to preserve and promote traditional culinary skills and dining culture – creating clusters of specialty snacks and developing "famous food towns" and "famous food villages".

- Organize the "Chinese Food" series of events and support local regions in hosting special catering promotions.

- Encourage internationally renowned catering brands to open their first stores or flagship stores in China.

Accommodation, residential services

Accommodation consumption:

- Improve the quality of accommodation services and foreign-related service levels, foster mid-to-high-end hotel and homestay brands, and support the integration of accommodation with tourism, healthcare, and study tours.

- Legally and compliantly vitalize idle rural houses and collective construction land to develop rural hotels and inns.

Residential services consumption:

- Encourage property service companies to partner with elderly care, childcare, catering, and housekeeping companies to develop the "property service + life service" model.

- Promote new models like smart security, smart parking, and smart access controls to boost community service levels and residential experiences.

- Foster leading enterprises that provide comprehensive, standardized products and services – such as renovation designs, customized home decorations, and smart home solutions.

- Support regions with conditions to assist residents in their home renovations and partial modifications.

Housekeeping service consumption:

- Support the development of employee-based housekeeping companies and smooth career development channels for housekeeping personnel.

- Strengthen the connection between housekeeping services and labor, promote housekeeping services within communities, and increase the supply of housekeeping services.

- Implement a skills upgrading initiative for housekeeping service personnel, promote the establishment of housekeeping service brands, and create a "heroine housekeeping service" brand.

- Guide the formulation of housekeeping service conventions, optimize the housekeeping service credit information platform, and promote the electronic home service certificate.

Elderly care, childcare

Elderly care and childcare consumption:

- Vigorously develop the silver economy, promote the smart health and elderly care industry, and enhance barrier-free public spaces and consumption places, improving the adaptability of home environments for the elderly.

- Accelerate the development of a coordinated home-community-institution elderly care service system – combining medical care and health services – and implement home and community basic elderly care service enhancement actions, promoting vocational schools to strengthen the training of staff.

- Increase the supply of elderly care and childcare services through multiple channels, support the lawful and compliant use of vacant sites for the new construction, renovation, and expansion of elderly care and childcare institutions, and reduce operating costs.

- Combine the renovation of old residential areas, the construction of complete communities, and the creation of community life circles to optimize the layout of housekeeping, elderly care, childcare, and meal assistance service facilities.

- Strictly implement requirements for the simultaneous planning, construction, acceptance, and delivery of elderly care and childcare service facilities in new residential areas.

- Ensure that water, electricity, gas, and heating for elderly care and childcare institutions are charged at residential rates.

- Support financial institutions in optimizing their risk management and providing financial products and services that meet the funding needs of inclusive elderly care and childcare institutions.

Cultural tourism, sports

Cultural entertainment consumption:

- Conduct nationwide cultural and tourism consumption promotion activities and continuously implement the "Hundred Cities, Hundred Districts" support plan for cultural and tourism consumption.

- Strengthen the protection and inheritance of intangible cultural heritage and develop key cultural and creative projects with regional and ethnic characteristics.

- Expand the supply of cultural performances, streamline the approval process, and increase the number of performances.

- Increase the supply of films, support differentiated distribution models such as sub-line releases, and promote film-related consumption.

- Enhance the quality of online literature, performances, games, radio, TV, and other audiovisual content. Streamline the management of complex TV fee structures and operations. Speed up the development of ultra-high-definition television. Promote new business models, such as immersive experiences, scripted entertainment, digital art, and online broadcasting.

Tourism consumption:

- Strengthen the construction of national cultural and tourism consumption demonstration cities, promote the innovative and standardized development of national-level nighttime cultural and tourism consumption clusters, as well as implement the beautiful life vacation and leisure project and rural tourism quality improvement and efficiency action.

- Promote the integrated development of business, tourism, culture, sports, and health, enhance project experiences and interactivity, launch various types of special tourism products, encourage the development of new formats such as cruise yachts, recreational vehicle camping, and the low-altitude economy, and support the integrated development of "music + tourism", "performance + tourism" and "events + tourism".

- Increase the number of silver tourism trains, modify the carriages to be more suitable and comfortable for the elderly, and enrich the supply of tourism routes and services.

- Encourage local regions to formulate and implement policies such as scenic spot ticket discounts and free entry during the off-season.

- Improve the quality of transportation services, enhance transfers and car rental services, and facilitate overall passenger travel.

- Optimize entry policies and the consumption environment, accelerate the restoration of flight frequencies, provide diversified payment services, study the expansion of visa-free countries, and extend cultural tourism year activities.

Sports consumption:

- Revitalize idle venues and site resources, guide social forces to legally and compliantly transform old factories, warehouses, and old commercial facilities, as well as increase sports consumption places.

- 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 local 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 batch of national sports industry and sports tourism development carriers.

Education, training

Education and training consumption:

- Promote the opening of high-quality educational resources by higher education institutions, research institutions, and social organizations to meet the diverse and personalized learning needs of the public.

- Promote the improvement and efficiency of vocational education and build high-level vocational schools and programs.

- Encourage social training institutions to improve service quality in response to public needs.

- Guide schools to introduce high-quality, non-academic, public welfare after-school services provided by qualified third-party institutions through service procurement and other means in accordance with relevant regulations.

- Encourage high-level cooperative education with internationally renowned higher education institutions in China.

New consumption

Digital consumption:

- 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 plus" medical services and digital education, accelerate the growth of new formats such as unmanned retail stores, self-service cabinets, and cloud cabinets, and support the development of e-sports, social e-commerce, and live e-commerce.

- Accelerate the construction and upgrading of information consumption experience centers and launch a batch of new information consumption projects.

- Carry out digital home construction pilots to better meet the needs of residents for intelligent home product services and online social services.

Green consumption:

- Establish and improve green and low-carbon service standards, certification, and labeling systems, improve green design standards, and enhance the market recognition and corporate benefits of green services.

- Promote the application of advanced green and low-carbon technologies, improve the management of energy efficiency and water efficiency labeling, and enhance the greening level of fields such as home decorations, travel, tourism, and express deliveries.

Health consumption:

- Cultivate and expand new service formats such as health check-ups, consultations, and management.

- Promote the development of "internet plus medical health", achieve interconnection and intercommunications of medical data as soon as possible and gradually improve the internet plus medical service medical insurance payment policy.

- Encourage the development of commercial health insurance products that meet the diverse and personalized health protection needs of citizens.

- Further promote the integration of medical care and elderly care and support medical institutions in providing integrated medical and elderly care services.

- Support the growth of traditional Chinese medicine enterprises and improve the service levels of health preservation, rehabilitation, and recuperation.

- Strengthen the functions of retail pharmacies in health promotions, nutrition and healthcare.

Bolstering service consumption momentum

Innovative service consumption scenarios:

- Carry out initiatives to improve the quality and benefits of service consumption.

- Conduct a series of service consumption promotion activities focusing on key areas that are close to people's lives, have a great demand potential, and have a strong driving effect.

- Promote the transformation and upgrading of pedestrian streets, accelerate the construction of 15-minute-radius community life circles, improve the county commercial system, and enhance the urban and rural service consumption network, enriching rural life service supply and boosting service supply capacity and consumption levels.

Strengthening service consumption brand cultivation:

- Explore the development of quality service commitment activities.

- Support service industry enterprises in strengthening brand cultivation, operation, and protection, and play a leading role in Chinese time-honored brands and traditional brands – cultivating a batch of service industry brands with good service quality, strong innovation momentum, and significant driving effects.

Expanding the opening up of the services industry:

- Utilize platforms such as integrated national demonstration zones for opening-up of the service sector (Chinese: 国家服务业扩大开放综合示范区) and national demonstration zones for innovative development of trade in services (Chinese: 国家服务贸易创新发展示范区) to actively connect with international high-standard economic and trade rules.

- Relax market access for the services industry, continuously deepen the opening up of fields such as telecommunications, education, elderly care, medical care, and health, and promote the full implementation of opening measures in fields such as technology services and tourism.

- Successfully hold exhibitions such as the China International Import Expo and the China International Fair for Trade in Services, attracting more internationally renowned business enterprises to invest and introduce more diverse services industry formats.

 

Sources: "zhengfu" WeChat account, VCG