China Prepares National Unified Market Regulations to Curb Local Barriers

China's top leadership has ordered the formulation of administrative regulations to build a unified national market, elevating efforts to curb local protectionism and regional market fragmentation into formal law. According to state media, the initiative follows a review by the National People's Congress Standing Committee on central government progress. In 2025, central economic and market regulators screened more than 38,000 local normative documents, repealing discriminatory barriers against outside businesses. Concurrently, authorities trimmed the nationwide market access negative list to 106 items and cleared all remaining foreign investment restrictions across the manufacturing sector.

Building a unified national market is central to Beijing's dual circulation strategy, aiming to unlock domestic demand and reduce systemic economic friction. Eliminating hidden local trade barriers, bidding preferences, and fragmented regional standards directly lowers institutional transaction and logistics costs. For domestic private firms and foreign multinationals, these legal reforms seek to replace localized protectionism and subsidy competition with a standardized, rules-based operating environment.

China is moving to formalize nationwide market integration through binding administrative regulations, seeking to dismantle entrenched regional trade barriers and curb local protectionism, according to reports from People's Daily. A recent meeting of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Political Bureau called for the drafting and implementation of specific regulations for constructing a national unified market. This directive follows a session of the 14th National People's Congress Standing Committee, which reviewed a State Council report evaluating progress, institutional bottlenecks, and next steps in national market integration since the central guidelines were first issued in 2022. To build statutory guardrails, central authorities recently published draft revisions to the Government Procurement Law and the Bidding and Tendering Law for public comment. The legislative updates aim to penalize collusive bidding, substandard practices, and discriminatory market division. According to Dong Biao, a law professor at Beijing Technology and Business University, China has established a four-tier fair competition review system spanning national, provincial, municipal, and county levels to screen policy interventions before they take effect. Enforcement campaigns in 2025 targeted preexisting barriers directly. Joint actions by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, and the State Administration for Market Regulation screened more than 38,000 local regulations, departmental rules, and normative files. Authorities repealed or revised documents that imposed discriminatory bidding criteria on outside firms, mandated local sourcing, or established arbitrary corporate relocation hurdles. As part of the wider market-access overhaul, the national negative list was condensed to 106 items, while the foreign investment negative list was reduced to 29 items, eliminating foreign ownership limits across the manufacturing sector. Inter-provincial administrative integration has also progressed in select hubs: in the Yangtze River Delta, business relocations across provincial borders can now be completed in a single day, while the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle launched a shared digital platform enabling one-stop corporate registration. Market integration is also expanding into resource and factor allocation. Official data shows a national unified power market was fundamentally established in 2025, enabling long-distance electricity transmissions from southwestern hydropower bases and northern renewable hubs to coastal industrial centers via inter-provincial spot trading. In labor mobility, central guidelines decoupling basic public service access from administrative household registration aim to lower barriers to inter-regional workforce movement.