The newly launched China (Inner Mongolia) Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ) will combine the region's abundant wind, solar, and coal resources with its industrial advantages and institutional innovation to build a modern industrial system with local characteristics, an official said on Friday.
China launched the pilot FTZ on Friday, aiming to develop the region into a high-level FTZ within three to five years, featuring streamlined investment and trade, a robust innovation ecosystem, competitive industrial clusters, and vibrant international exchanges.
According to an overall plan, the pilot FTZ will support the full utilization of Inner Mongolia's existing strengths to promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional sectors such as dairy and grassland industries, said assistant minister of commerce Yuan Xiaoming at a press conference in Beijing.
The FTZ will also encourage innovation-driven growth in strategic emerging sectors including new energy, new materials, aerospace and aviation, and biomedicine, the official said.
"For example, Inner Mongolia accounts for 57 percent of China's exploitable wind resources and 21 percent of its solar resources. Building on this, we need to further improve grid absorption capacity, unlock the potential of green electricity utilization, and refine the electricity market standards system. The overall plan proposes measures such as improving green power consumption policies, carrying out green electricity certificate trading, and improving equipment recycling standards to boost the development capacity of the FTZ's energy sector," Yuan said.
The plan also sets tasks for building edge computing centers, developing and applying large language models, and expanding application scenarios for green computing power to help the Inner Mongolia FTZ provide fast and efficient computing services to a wider region.
In the meantime, the FTZ will actively explore new driving forces such as bio-manufacturing to develop new quality productive forces adapted to local conditions, according to the official.