Sharla Cheung： Cross-regional exhibition agglomeration supports institutional market opening
Market is a scarce resource for economic development. To learn and understand the Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Accelerating the Construction of a Unified National Market, we must first understand that the key to unification lies in the unification of systems, rules and standards, and the goal orientation is openness, fairness, standardization and efficiency. To speed up the construction of a unified national market, it is required to realize institutional opening in cross-regional agglomeration, break through the key blocking points that restrict the economic cycle, solve the problem of local protection market segmentation that plagues the marketization process, and the homogenization competition and low-level repetition derived from it, and accelerate the construction of a new development pattern.
The exhibition industry focuses on trade promotion and takes the optimal allocation of cross-regional resource elements as its own responsibility. It is characterized by the business gathering of supply and demand and communication in decision-making, which not only involves a wide range, a long industrial chain, but also plays a leading role in radiation. Moreover, the integration is effective, takes into account the factors and resources, and the theme is flexible and the rules reach consensus. It is not only an indispensable characteristic platform for an open economy and a modern market system, but also an indispensable strategic tool for accelerating the construction of a unified national market.
Exhibition is a strategic tool for cross-regional opening.
Opening-up is the basic national policy of China’s development. Among them, opening up to the outside world is the proper meaning in the title. The relationship between them is interdependent, interactive and complementary. Since the reform and opening-up, we have finally stepped out of the closed cage of the planned economy and ushered in the great leap-forward development of the national economy. From "poverty and poverty" to a well-off society, we have mainly adopted an export-oriented economy. Through the hard work and sweat of the people of the whole country, we have realized the rapid accumulation of technology, experience, capital and market in trade exchanges with the outside world, and formed an "away" globalization model characterized by the use of external markets, laying a foundation for modernization.
In the meantime, the convention and exhibition industry, as a strategic tool for opening to the outside world, has played a key role in taking the lead and making Ma Benteng a success. As the main channel of foreign trade, the Canton Fair, together with ten thousand exhibitions in Qian Qian every year, has greatly promoted the development of import and export and made irreplaceable contributions to the localization of global resources and the globalization of local production. The data shows that the Canton Fair, the main platform for foreign trade transactions in various provinces and cities in China, has maintained an annual turnover of around 50% in the whole country for a long time since its establishment in 1957, and even as high as 70% in some years. Since the reform and opening up, especially after China’s accession to the WTO, we have further opened our doors to construction, creating a world miracle of economic growth, not only eliminating absolute poverty and making 1.4 billion people well off, but also entering a new stage of modernization. In 2021, the total number of market players in China will increase to 150 million, the total import and export volume will set a new record of 39.1 trillion, and the gross national product will reach 114.4 trillion.
At the same time, due to the residual influence of the planned system and the realistic limitation of administrative competition, the construction of large domestic markets failed to keep up with the pace of opening up. The data show that China’s export volume has increased rapidly at an average annual rate of 18% over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, but the average annual growth rate of inter-provincial trade volume is only 4.8%. The imbalance between domestic and foreign trade is relatively prominent.
To further deepen reform and open wider to the outside world, the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee put forward a major strategic plan of "accelerating the construction of a new development pattern with the domestic big cycle as the main body and the domestic and international double cycles promoting each other". As a landmark project to promote a new round of high-level opening-up in China, China International Import Expo(CIIE), together with a number of new business exhibition platforms such as the Service Trade Fair, CIFIT and Consumer Expo, continues to innovate in the content, structure, methods and paths of foreign trade on the one hand, and opens its arms to the great development and prosperity of domestic trade on the other.
Exhibition is a market-oriented platform driven by innovation.
Faced with the impact of the changes in the past century and the COVID-19 epidemic, some problems of "decoupling", "building a wall" and "blocking the neck" in international trade are highlighted, which is the dilemma of low-end locking in the three industrial value chains. At the present stage of modernization, China’s industry is moving from labor-intensive and resource-intensive to technology-intensive, knowledge-intensive and capital-intensive, and further from the low-end to the high-end of the value chain. At the same time, we have to ensure the safety and reliability of the industrial chain supply chain. To this end, we should not only continue to seize the international market, but also work hard to deepen the domestic market.
Accelerating the construction of a unified national market reflects the urgent need for innovation. Smith’s law tells us that the professional division of labor depends on the market size. The bigger the market, the larger the production scale, the deeper the professional division of labor, the more sufficient the investment in science and technology, the higher the product cost performance ratio, and the stronger the cross-regional siphon effect of the market. Supermarkets are the standard configuration of first-class technology. The situation requires us to fully promote the smooth flow of factor resources in a wider scope, deepen the professional division of labor, turn the market scale advantage into the driving force of innovation, and realize the home promotion of value chain, the upgrading of industrial base and the modernization of industrial chain through the "home" globalization dominated by domestic demand.
To speed up the construction of a unified national market is not to oppose market opening on the grounds of domestic demand, but to further promote the international cycle with the domestic cycle and create more new opportunities, new impetus and new markets for the global economy with the potential and strength of the domestic market.
Of course, it takes a lot of hard work to transform China’s super-large-scale market advantage from a potential state into the reality of innovation-driven and value chain upgrading. At present, China has become the second largest market in the world. Although the total amount is only $200 billion from the largest market country, the per capita market consumption is less than a quarter of the other market. In the future, we must not only rely on our largest population base in the world to effectively improve the ability and level of per capita consumption, but also rely on our own ability and level to promote market-oriented construction.
In order to speed up the construction of a unified national market, according to the spirit of the central government, we must do a good job in five aspects: strengthening the unification of basic market rules, promoting the fairness and unification of market supervision, promoting the high-standard interconnection of market facilities, creating a unified factor and resource market, and promoting the high-level unification of commodity and service markets. This points out the direction for our work. The future convention and exhibition industry is vast and promising.
Exhibition will promote the fusion and release of the main vitality
Unifying the big market requires cross-regional institutional opening, and on the basis of national unification of standard rules, we should focus on solving the problem of insufficient opening of the domestic market, especially market segmentation and micro-intervention; Through the mechanism and function of super-large-scale marketization, we will further emancipate the enthusiasm, initiative and creativity of market subjects and release the potential and vitality of enterprise subjects.
For enterprises, the market is the most scarce resource. Enterprises draw demand and resources from the market, and obtain technology, experience, talents, data and management from the market, provide goods or services for the market, and realize exchange value through market mechanism. Practice has proved that as long as there is a market, enterprises with expanding nature can become bigger and stronger. In this regard, enterprises can have no upper limit. The essence of this operation is to integrate into the market system, seek product innovation, and strive to optimize resource allocation and maximize transaction efficiency.
The difficulty lies in the modern market dominated by buyers, which is a global market connected at home and abroad. The innovation of products and services of enterprises must face world-class market competition. Limited conditions and costs, first-class product requirements force enterprises to seek low-cost and high-efficiency market-oriented platforms, exert all their strength and wisdom, find a way for enterprises to survive and innovate, integrate personalized endowment characteristics with cross-regional resource elements, catalyze the fusion of subject vitality to release energy levels, and form market advantages in cooperation and competition. The convention and exhibition industry came into being.
Enterprises looking for creativity, capital, technology, materials, talents, experience and information need a low-cost and high-efficiency market-oriented platform provided by exhibitions to achieve cross-regional industrial clusters in thematic subdivision areas at a specific time and place, exhaust all possibilities of resource element cooperation in directional invitations, compete for strength and characteristics in competitive exhibitions, achieve the best cost performance in diversified choices, deepen understanding and trust in cognitive interactions, and move toward many-to-many interactive communication.
The value of exhibition lies in the cross-regional communication service. Its main function is to stimulate innovation and creativity, build market correlation, optimize resource allocation and reach understanding and trust. Its core function is to deepen professional division of labor and promote large-scale cooperation. Its outstanding advantages are full competition, direct communication and its low cost and high efficiency. Driven by the law of increasing returns to scale, it leads the exhibition platform from intercity, provincial and international to the world, which provides the possibility for a deeper division of labor and larger-scale cooperation in human society.
A large-scale, complete structure, strong function, flexible mechanism and optimized environment China market, which is characterized by institutional openness and fairness under the rule of law, will not only help China’s economy to move from the low-end to the high-end in the value chain, but also accelerate the construction of a new development pattern with domestic big cycle as the main body and domestic and international double cycles promoting each other. (Author: Sharla Cheung is the Executive Dean of Shanghai Convention and Exhibition Research Institute and a professor/doctoral supervisor of Shanghai University.)