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BEIJING, Sept. 20-- China will set up more cross-border e-commerce pilot zones in favor of trade facilitation to boost China's global competitiveness, according to a decision made at a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday. The meeting decided to extend the success of cross-border e-commerce pilot zones to more cities with good infrastructure and strong trade and e-commerce development potential across the country. The original initiative was set in motion by the State Council in Hangzhou in 2017 before being expanded to another 12 cities, including Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, since early 2016. Some good practices are going national, such as the development of online comprehensive service platforms incorporating custom clearance, logistics, tax refund, payment, fund raising and risk control services and offline industrial parks providing whole-industrial-chain services. "We need to enable the healthy development of cross-border e-commerce and speed up the growth of new engines, making the foreign trade sector more adaptive to new circumstances and better endowed with new cutting edges," Li said. "The prospect of cross-border e-commerce is very bright." Statistics by the Ministry of Commerce shows that 220 countries and regions across the world were covered by China's cross-border e-commerce network as of 2016, with a turnover of 5.85 trillion yuan (891 billion U.S. dollars), up by 28.2 percent year-on-year. | 
