Street view of Sanlitun [Photo via VCG]

The thematic forum "Vigorous Beijing: Unleash Vitality of Consumption", as part of the 2023 The Beijing News Think-Tank Spring Summit themed "Confidence and Prosperity", was held on April 11. The Forum was co-hosted by the Beijing News and Qianlong.com and organized by the Beijing News Think Tank and Seashell Finance. According to Chen Dai, Director of the Administration Committee of Beijing Central Business District, Chaoyang District will embrace the new trends of consumption upgrading, promote the integrated development of commerce, tourism, culture, sports, and science, improve the environment for consumption, innovate consumption scenarios, and create new demands with high-quality supplies, to boost up the District's development capacity as the main support zone of an international consumption center city.

As Chen introduced, a consumption ecosystem encompasses both the "hard" and "soft" environments. In terms of the "hard" environment, Chaoyang will optimize the construction of transport corridors between business districts, launch the project of the slow transport system of Sanlitun Road, connect the roads around Hopson One, and promote the interconnection of commercial outlets as well as the integration of important business districts. Meanwhile, the District will speed up the layout of new infrastructure, ensure full coverage of 5G signals, and gradually extend the application of 5G+8K and 5G+AR/MR to more scenarios. It will highlight the leading role of digital consumption and create more application scenarios, thus enhancing the supply capacities of the metaverse, e-sports and other industries in the field of digital consumption. It will also support the China World Trade Center, Sanlitun, SOLANA, and Chaoyang Joy City in piloting the mode of smart business districts.

Chaoyang is also striving to create a good "soft" environment for consumption. On the one hand, it will better serve enterprises and optimize the business environment for consumption. The business environment in Chaoyang has ranked first among that of all districts in Beijing for four consecutive years. The District has taken the lead in establishing a regular "service package" system in Beijing to provide "butler-like" services for enterprises, and introduced a range of policies on promoting the high-quality development of the business economy in a bid to strengthen policy support for enterprises in the consumption sector. On the other hand, the District has improved the mechanism for protecting consumers' rights to maintain a good consumption market. It has set up a task force to deal with prepaid consumption problems through joint interviews with multiple governmental authorities and on-site law enforcement; and launched a "new model of the deposit and management of digital RMB fund" to effectively protect consumers' legitimate rights and interests. The District will also advocate legal and honest business operations and enhance consumers' rights-protection awareness through publicity and guidance, thus creating a consumption environment characterized by fairness, stability and transparency.

(Source: The Beijing News)