Smart Customs at a Glance: 5.2B Tons of Trade Facilitated Annually Under China's 14th Five-Year Plan

 

 

"If this shipment missed its flight, we’d have no idea how to secure alternative air cargo space," said anxiously by Wang Chun, a shift supervisor of China Southern Air Logistics (Baiyun), in the cargo terminal of Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. Just as cargo space was at a premium during the international logistics peak, a shipment of cross-border e-commerce goods was held up by bad weather.

With the goods delivered in under five hours before departure, Wang Chun promptly notified the aviation logistics public information platform, triggering an immediate Customs release. Upon the declarant's initiation of the exit application, the air waybill was approved in just five minutes, culminating in the goods being assembled onto pallets and loaded smoothly onto the flight. This operational efficiency is anchored in Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport Customs' direct export model for e-commerce and its digital and intelligent transformation to the clearance process, facilitating the accelerated movement of imported and exported goods.

As a witness, recorder, participant, and promoter of China's foreign trade development, the General Administration of Customs has been driving regulatory reform and innovation, optimizing business processes, and comprehensively transforming and upgrading Customs supervision and services to support high-level opening up. Since the launch of the 14th Five-Year Plan, Customs has supervised an average of 5.2 billion metric tons of imports and exports annually, with a total value of 41.5 trillion yuan, making it the largest volume globally. In the first eight months of this year, China's goods trade maintained steady growth, with the total import and export value reaching 29.57 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.5 percent.

Smart Customs Paves an "Expressway" for Goods Trade.

At Xi'an Guojigang railway station in Shaanxi, one after another, the China-Europe Railway Express sets off with a blast, its carriages filled with home appliances and machinery. Throughout the first eight months of the year, the Xi'an route dispatched 4,069 trains, representing a year-on-year growth of 12.4 percent, and carried 4.548 million tons of freight, a 11.9 percent increase from the same period last year.

Powered by robust Smart Customs infrastructure, these results are no accident. When trucks loaded with goods enter the Customs surveillance area, intelligent gate systems instantly recognize and capture their information via cameras and sensors, streaming the data directly to the supervision platform for highly efficient clearance. Xi'an Customs further tackled inefficiency by dismantling data silos and launching the Smart Logistics Supervision System for Xi'an Port, which improved total cargo flow timeliness by 58 percent.

A series of initiatives, including pilot remote local inspections that slashed inspection time by 90 percent and an optimized inspection model for vacuum-packed high-tech goods that cut clearance time by 80 percent, have paved a goods trade "expressway," enabling "Made in China" products to reach global markets more smoothly than ever.

Smart Customs Has Forged "Eagle Eyes" for Risk Prevention.

In a Customs laboratory in Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu, a video conference was underway. "The Timber Identification system has preliminarily screened this batch of wood carvings as the endangered species African Blackwood. We request expert confirmation," stated Fu Maoqiang, a Customs officer from Lianyungang Customs.

Five days later, the carvings were confirmed to be African Blackwood, matching the system's initial assessment. The Timber Identification system represents a key achievement in "AI-Powered Remote Wood Identification and Support" initiative under the Smart Customs program. Having undergone testing and deployment at 44 ports and laboratories, it can currently identify items under the inspection category for imports and exports, including 145 common timber species and wood packaging materials (both coniferous and broad-leaved), 110 types of weed seeds, and 32 insect species.

Smart Customs has fortified national gate security through targeted and contactless technologies: QR traceability codes that precisely identify and combat reselling scams exploiting duty-free shopping quotas, alongside intelligent health quarantine gates that enable seamless, unimpeded clearance for travelers. These innovations work in tandem to maintain robust oversight amid tidal waves of passengers and cargo, firmly upholding both safety baselines and regulatory boundaries.

"Given the complex and severe foreign trade landscape this year," a spokesperson from the General Administration of Customs stated, "Customs will collaborate with relevant departments, local authorities, and foreign trade enterprises to foster a port business environment that is faster, more convenient, efficient, smooth, coordinated, and transparent, thereby facilitating high-quality development of foreign trade."

(Contributed by Ding Qianqian)

 

 

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