China's manufacturing sector makes solid progress thanks to policy supports

BEIJING, July 26 (Xinhua) -- China's manufacturing sector has demonstrated strong resilience and growth potential, with the government rolling out a raft of policies to stabilize the industrial chain, ease burdens on enterprises, and promote industrial transformation.

In the first half of the year, the value-added output of China's manufacturing sector accounted for 28.8 percent of the country's GDP, up 1.4 percentage points from 2021, data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) shows.

Manufacturing investment maintained a relatively high growth rate, climbing 10.4 percent year on year during the same period.

In the second quarter alone, manufacturing investment grew 7.4 percent, 3.2 percentage points higher than the growth rate of fixed-asset investment, according to the data.

High-tech manufacturing, which saw its value-added output increase 9.6 percent year on year in the January-June period, was a major force pushing the manufacturing sector's high-quality development, the data shows.

Authorities have ratcheted up efforts to smooth industrial and supply chains in recent months, establishing a "white list" mechanism and carrying out cross-departmental and cross-regional coordination to support enterprises in key areas and industries as they resume production amid COVID-19 outbreaks.

The accumulative tax refunds, tax and fee cuts, and tax and fee deferrals for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) reached nearly 1.8 trillion yuan (about 266.73 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of the year, thanks to multiple preferential policies to ease enterprise burdens.

Tian Yulong, chief engineer of MIIT, said the ministry will continue to foster new industries and new drivers to boost industrial resilience.

The ministry plans to cultivate about 3,000 new "little giants," the novel elites of SMEs that are engaged in manufacturing, specialize in niche markets and boast cutting-edge technologies.

China has also been pushing forward the development of the industrial internet, which has already been applied to 45 major categories of the national economy.

The scale of the industrial internet industry has exceeded 1 trillion yuan.

The country currently has more than 3,100 "5G + Industrial Internet" projects. Of that number, 700 projects were established during the second quarter of the year.

Efforts will be made to comprehensively upgrade and optimize the technical, industrial, network, application and ecological system of "5G + Industrial Internet," and form more scenarios to be applied to production, according to the MIIT.