Service personnel get ready for work before the opening of a press conference held Thursday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Photo: CFP



China should further simplify administrative reviews and break the monopoly of State sectors to allow the market to play a bigger role in the economy, a member of China's top political advisory body said Thursday.

"Many local governments put fast GDP growth as their top priority, seeking to boost investment to fuel growth and at the same time interfering in the allocation of resources in the market," Chi Fulin, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and director of the China Institute for Reform and Development, said Thursday.

The economic growth pattern creates many problems such as unbalanced growth of investment and consumption, duplicate construction, environmental pollution, corruption and eroded public trust in governments, Chi said at the ongoing ­CPPCC session. 

To tackle the problems, we need to balance the relation between the government and the market and transform the government's function by reducing administrative reviews and breaking the monopoly of State sectors, Chi said.

"Government administrative reform is aimed at addressing the centralization of power, and the country has achieved some progress in the past decade," Zhu Lijia, a professor at the Department of Public Administration at the Chinese Academy of Governance, told the Global Times Thursday.

"But it is far from enough to make the government function efficiently. The next stage of the reform should focus on extending the pilot program of reducing administrative reviews," Zhu said. 

The State Council announced in August that it would remove or reduce administrative reviews of 314 projects, and that South China's Guangdong Province would be a pilot region for the reforms.

The State Council said the deregulation will involve areas such as investment and social programs, with a focus on projects concerning the real economy, small and micro-­enterprises, and private capital.

China has removed or simplified administrative reviews of 2,497 projects since 2001, when it launched the administrative review system reform, accounting for 69.3 percent of the total original projects subject to administrative review during that time, data from the State Council showed.