China’s tax cuts tipped to hit US$285b 
2019-12-25
China’s tax cuts and administrative fee reductions in 2019 are expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan (US$285.4 billion).
According to China’s Ministry of Finance, the country has slashed taxes and fees of nearly 2 trillion yuan in the first 10 months of this year. 
The figure is estimated to be higher than 2 trillion yuan for the whole year, accounting for over 2 percent of overall gross domestic product.
This would effectively reduce the burden on the real economy and promote high-quality economic development, Xu Hongcai, the vice minister of finance, said yesterday.
Xu said the real economy is an important support to promote high-quality development. 
China’s economic development has turned from high-speed growth to high-quality development. It is in a crucial period of changing the development mode, optimizing the economic structure and transforming the growth impetus, Xu said.
Economic growth is no longer simply pursuing high speed, while the development mode has also switched focus from scale and speed to quality and efficiency. 
The momentum for growth, meanwhile, has shifted from relying mainly on resources and low-cost manpower to being driven by innovation.
Similarly, the development of the real economy also faces the requirement of changing from quantitative scale expansion to qualitative benefit promotion, according to Xu.
He said the tax policies had supported the steady progress in the optimization of the economic structure and the accelerating development of emerging industries.
For instance, China has put into practice an inclusive tax reduction for small and micro-enterprises, which raised the threshold of value-added tax from 30,000 yuan of monthly sales to 100,000 yuan for small-scale taxpayers.
With such preferential policies, tax cuts for the private sector totaled 1.05 trillion yuan in the period from January to October, accounting for 63.8 percent of overall tax cuts, of which 186 billion yuan was for small and micro-enterprises.
