People’s Congress. In 2016, Guangzhou Municipal People’s Congress and its standing committee examined a total of 101 issues, appointed and dismissed government officials for 196 person-times, organized a total of 13,260 person-times of delegates on different levels to visit local communities, received 6,829 person-times of visits from the people; collected and handled 7,600 pieces of opinions and suggestions from the people and helped to tackle a lot of issues of which the people are very concerned.

CPPCC Work. In 2016, the CPPCC (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference) Guangzhou Municipal Committee focused its attention on the central tasks, assisting the CPC Guangzhou Municipal Committee to set aside 15 subjects for political consultation and pushing forward the deployment and implementation of major policies. The committee also insisted on nurturing key proposals, soliciting over 614 proposals, putting on record over 420 of them, handling and providing feedbacks for 420 proposals throughout the year and supervising the handling of 16 key proposals, achieving sound results in the process.

Legal Environment

The city, attaching great importance to the establishment of the “Pearl River Delta Demonstrational Zone on Law-ruled Government”, pushed forward the reform of “Government Decentralization, Impartial Supervision and Efficient Service”, speeding up the transformation of government roles and raising the overall standard of law-based administration effectively in 2016. In the same year, the city formulated 8 government rules and regulations, abolished 4 government rules and regulations, proposed 7 regional regulations to the municipal people’s congress for legislation and promulgated 31 regulatory documents.

People's Procuratorate

The city’s procuratorial organs approved the arrest of altogether 25,647 individuals for criminal offences and prosecuted 24,282 of them. The authorities also put on record and prosecuted 635 individuals for the abuse of power, prosecuted 215 for bribery, tracked down and arrested 26 escaped convicts, retrieved the illicit fund and saved the economic loss of 297 million yuan in the process.

People’s Court

In 2016, both municipal and district level local courts handled a total of 370,346 cases of various categories including criminal cases, civil cases and enforcement cases, settling 293,564 cases in the meanwhile.

Judicial Work

In 2016, the city’s government lawyers handled a total of 12,436 cases as well as 14,886 legal assistance cases, providing compulsory legal consultation for 40,259 person-times. Local notary offices attended to a total of 402,500 notary cases and 51,000 cases of judicial expertise, up 18%. The people’s mediation organizations on all levels mediated a total of nearly 60,000 cases and succeeded in 59,400 cases, with the success rate reaching 99%.

Discipline Inspection & Supervision

In 2016, the city’s discipline inspection and supervision departments handled a total of 7,406 cases of mass reports with letters and visits and put on record 1,344 cases involving 1,344 individuals, up 25.4% and 24.3% year on year, respectively; integrated and established 36 discipline inspection and supervision organs in various local departments, realizing the 100% coverage of municipal level Party and government departments. Local authorities also attached great importance to the focal points, difficulties and hot spots in improving the Party’s working style and ensuring clean and honest administration; formulated, promulgated and enforced a series of key documents on holding face-to-face talks with the No.1s of respectively units on non-delegable and independent duty, strengthening good family traditions of leading officials and creating new-type government-business relationship; and established a series of innovation systems including the opinions on supporting reform & renovation and allowing failures & errors as well as the implementation opinions for state-owned enterprises and the ten measures on strengthening supervision on the No.1s of the respective units.

Food & Drug Supervision

Guangzhou advocated the “Year of Food Safety” in 2016, kicking off the all-around initiative to create the National Trial City on Food Safety. The city has installed “see-through kitchens” in over 35,000 caterers and realized the video monitoring of all the dinning halls of local primary and middle schools as well as the central kitchens of high-risk units, the distribution units for collective dinning and the key surveillance units. Local food and drug authorities dispatched a total of 405,000 person-times of law enforcement officials, inspected various local enterprises for 378,000 times, put on record 4,590 cases, confiscated 76,997,300 yuan, demolished 187 dens producing counterfeit products and transferred 84 cases to public security departments.

Public Security

In 2016, the security alerts put on record and criminal cases were down 4.6% and 14.7% year on year, respectively; the homicide cases were down 11.8%, year on year, thanks to the local authorities’ effort to take into control eight categories of serious violence cases, especially homicde cases, and reducing the number to below 200 cases in 2015 for the first time in ten years.

Customs

In 2016, Guangzhou Customs kicked off the trial operation of the tax collection and administration center (Guangzhou), with the “All Custom Offices Operating Like One” administrative model achieving initial success; pushed forward the integrated reform of “Internet+Convenient Customs Clearance”, with 2.45 million invoices of cargo going through self-serving clearance, directly saving 73.425 million yuan of clearance fee for relevant enterprises.

In the same year, Guangzhou Customs supervised the import and export of 77.699 million tons of cargo, the departure and arrival of 20.336 million person-times of individuals, the entry and exit of 237 million pieces of postal items as well as 25.628 million pieces of express mails. As far as anti-smuggling is concerned, a total of 4,049 cases had been put on record throughout the year including 101 criminal cases on drug smuggling, seizing 774.66 kilograms of drugs.

Market Supervision

Guangzhou was granted the title of “National Model City on Quality Control” in 2016 and local experiences on quality control was promoted nationwide, including “first quality commitment of the seller at key department stores ”.

The city was granted 108 Guangdong Provincial Brand-names, bringing the total number to 296, a new high in recent years. The overall quality of local products had been kept steady and sound, with the rate of qualified products in the manufacturing sector reaching 96.74%, up 3.06 percentage points year on year. Local quality control authorities dispatched a total of 3,551 person-times of law enforcement officials, investigating and cracking 699 cases, involving 133 million yuan worth of cargo.

Industrial & Commercial Administration

As of 2016, the city had 1.517 million market entities and 555,000 validly registered trademarks, ranking as No. 1 of all Chinese sub-provincial cities as well as cities specifically designated in the state plan. Local industrial & commercial administrative and market supervision organs put on record, investigated and cracked 5161 cases of economic crimes and handled over 122,900 consumer complaints in the meantime. The first trade mark review and cooperation center outside Beijing and the first dispatch office of trade mark bureau outside Beijing was inaugurated in Guangzhou, which proclaimed the establishment of National Trade Mark Brand Innovation and Start-ups (Guangzhou) Base.

Cross-border E-commerce. The city’s cross-border e-commerce sector realized the import and export of 14.68 billion yuan RMB in total, up 1.2 times over the same period of the year before, ranking on top of the nation and taking up nearly 30% of the nation’s total.

Maritime Security

In the same year, the satisfaction rate of the local maritime authorities reached 98.3% acording to a third party opinion poll. Three of the four indexes of marine accidents dropped and the last one was kept on the same level as 2015, of which the number of accidents, shipwrecks and direct economic losses dropped 25%, 80% and 37.89%, respectively, throughout the year. Guangzhou maritime organs salvaged 1,156 persons and 69 ships in 2016, with the sucess rate of 99.1%.

Auditing Work

Local auditing offices focused their attention on exercising the power of supervision in 2016 through independently auditing in accordance with the law, creating new mechanisms, boosting universal coverage of the supervision on leading officials’ fulfillment of their economic duty as well as project implementation, public funds, national assets and national resources. The auditing offices finished the auditing (investigation) of 312 cases throughout the year, discovering 82.972 billion yuan of major questionable funds including 692 million yuan of illegal fund, 602 million yuan of wasted fund and 81.678 billion yuan of irregularly managed fund. A total of 41 million yuan were retrieved (kept from being squandered) after the auditing.

Social Credit

In 2016, Guangzhou formulated and issued the “Guangzhou Work Plan on Social Security System Construction”, speeding up the creation of the public credit information management system covering the whole city, gathering 161,004 pieces of information on the “Dual Public Announcement” of administrative permit and administrative penalty from 25 government organs and 2 districts. The authorities also pushed forward the online operation of the new credit.gz.gov.cn website, providing more than 4 million times of consultation in total.

Trade hub to innovation hotland

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is fast becoming an epicentre for scientists and researchers to join forces with industry to develop new high-tech products and innovations.

——Nature, the leading international science magazine

Guangzhou ranks the first in the Chinese cities with the Human Development Index of 0.869 based on a set of measurable indicators ranging across life expectancy, education and life quality.

——China Urban Sustainability Report 2016: Measuring Ecological Inputs and Human Development_United Nations Development Program