How China's 'most advanced county' serves business

Kunshan, a county-level city in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, has become the first of its size in China to have 1 million market entities.

Wang Maolin, a partner in Standard Robots, received the city's millionth business license from Li Wen, Kunshan's deputy mayor at the local administrative examination and approval bureau on Tuesday.

It was his first trip to the bureau. All the material required to start the robotics company was submitted online, and all procedures were handled by workers from Lujia township, where the company is located.

"I never thought that the examination and approval would be this quick," said Wang. "It took us less than six months from signing the contract with Kunshan to receive the business license."

A leading mobile robot system and core technology supplier in China, Standard Robots was lured away from Shenzhen last year by the Kunshan government.

Wang said he visited Kunshan only three times to complete negotiations with the local government and sign the contract to complete the company's 14,000 square-meter global headquarters.

"The company started operations in May, and workers from Lujia took the initiative to contact five or six customers for us," he said. "I have full confidence that our company will thrive in Kunshan."

In 2020, the registered capital of new domestic enterprises in Kunshan exceeded 105.5 billion yuan ($16.2 billion), an increase of nearly 30 percent over 2019. Investment in State-owned enterprises increased nearly 76 percent.

Kunshan has steadily improved its business environment over the years. Since July 2019, the city has reduced the time to start up a company from the statutory 20 working days to one working day.

The city has been promoting electronic registration since last year. All the registration procedures, including engraving seals, opening bank accounts and opening tax accounts, can all be finished online.

At the intelligent self-service registration terminals of the Kunshan government service hall, instead of submitting paper materials, qualified businesspeople only need to pass face recognition, ID card recognition or other recognition process before self-audit and self-printing of the business license.

Dubbed China's most advanced county, Kunshan saw its local GDP reach 427 billion yuan in 2020 and its total industrial output value exceed 1 trillion yuan, despite COVID-19. The city has remained in first place on the list of China's top 100 counties for more than 10 years.