General

On the morning of the 20th, the State Council Reform Office held a press conference on "guarding the country's door, promoting development, and contributing customs forces to promoting Chinese path to modernization". Yu Jianhua, Director of the General Administration of Customs, introduced at the meeting that in 2022, China's total foreign trade value exceeded 42 trillion yuan, an unprecedented scale in the history of human trade.

According to import and export data, in 2022, the import and export cargo volume under customs supervision nationwide reached 4.8 billion tons, 13 million vehicles (aircraft, ships) such as cargo ships, planes, trains, and other transportation vehicles, and 320 million cross-border express mails were supervised.

"If China's import and export goods from last year were loaded onto a train, they could circle the Earth's equator 30 times end-to-end; if the containers under customs supervision last year were connected together, they could be arranged in two rows between the Earth and the moon." Yu Jianhua said vividly.

In the decade of the new era, cross-border trade has made significant progress. Import and export data show that up to now, there are 1.85 million import and export enterprises registered with the customs, three times as many as 10 years ago. Import and export data show that in December 2022, the overall customs clearance time for imports and exports across the country was 67% and 92% shorter than the same period in 2017.

Guarding the country's gates is the basic responsibility of the customs. At the press conference, Yu Jianhua reported a group of import and export data: in 2022, the national customs detected 55000 positive cases of COVID-19, intercepted 580000 kinds of harmful organisms, supervised the import and export of 590 million tons of dangerous chemicals, returned and destroyed 2900 batches of substandard food and cosmetics, seized 1.2 million pieces of various contraband and 2.8 tons of drugs, registered and investigated more than 4500 smuggling crimes, with a value of more than 120 billion yuan, and maintained national security and business environment. China Customs has won the United Nations Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Award four times and the "Clark Bavin" Wildlife Law Enforcement Award twice, demonstrating China's image as a responsible power to the world.

According to import and export data, in 2022, China's foreign trade exceeded 40 trillion yuan for the first time, steadily ranking first in the world's goods trade for six consecutive years.

"Reform and technology are driven by two wheels." Yu Jianhua said that in the next step, the customs will take smart customs as the starting point, promote the reform of modern customs, and strive to build a world-class customs that leads the trend of international customs supervision and serves China's high-quality development.