Q: What are integral conditions of duties in our country in 2009? What are basic principles that this duty adjustment will follow?

A: According to the commitment we made in WTO entry, our country will further reduce import tariffs on five kinds of products such as strawberry from January 1, 2009. For the scope of concerned products for tax reduction and the decreasing range of tax rate is quite small, it has little influence on general level of duties. The general level of duty in 2009 is still 9.8% and the same as that in 2008, among which the average tax rate of agricultural products is still 15.2%, and the average tax rate of industrial products is still 8.9%. After this tax reduction, our country has basically fulfilled the commitment on tax reduction while entering the WTO, with the general level of duty dropped from 15.3% while entering the WTO to 9.8% at present.

In 2009, the basic principles for duty adjustment are as follows: with the spirit of 17th National Congress of the CPC and The Third Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee of the Communist Party as guidance, to deeply carry out scientific development view, adhere to domestic demand enlargement and flexible and prudent macroeconomic policy, give full play to duty regulation and control lever effect under the positive financial policy framework, promote stable and rapid economic development, accelerate stable increase of foreign trade and optimization of structure of imports and exports, and impel economic development mode transition and industrial structure adjustment.

Q: What measures are mainly taken for positive financial policy execution and international financial crisis settlement in this duty adjustment?

A: To deal with relevant impact of international financial crisis on the economy and foreign trade in our country and effectively carry out positive financial policies, as an important lever in regulating economy, duty will be further strengthened of its regulation and control function to keep stable increase in foreign trade, optimize structure of imports and exports, promote economic development mode transition, adjust industrial structure and domestic demands.

The first is to support the development of agriculture and rural economics, promote increase of agriculture yield and peasant incomes, and impose low import interim tax on animal food, pesticide intermediate and other agricultural production materials as well as tea picking machine, potato and beet harvester, vegetable forage harvester, large-scale reaper and other farm machinery and spare parts. We will cancel the import interim tax on bean cake, pork and nim oil according to domestic market supply and demand variations and restore the most favored nation tariff. At the same time, to guarantee fertilizer demands for domestic agricultural productions, we will continue charge seasonal export taxes on urea, ammonium monoacid phosphate and other fertilizers and special export taxes on partial fertilizers such as compound fertilizer and relevant raw materials.

The second is to support high-tech development, encourage enterprise to conduct independent innovation, impulse industrial structure upgrading and promote revival of domestic equipment manufacturing industry. We will impose low import interim tax rate on those electronic, chemical engineering and information technology products and raw materials which can not be manufactured domestically or have disqualified technical characteristics and indices for domestic ones such as orientation silicon electricity steel wide plate, ion exchange membrane and Polaroid for LCD and those key equipment and spare parts which may help introduction of new technologies and generalization for application such as gas laser generator and stepless change compressor for air conditioner.

The third is to promote energy conservation and environment protection, encourage renewable recourses application and promote sustainable economic development. We continue to adopt low import interim tax rate on energy resource products such as selenium, fuel oil, electrolytic copper and tantalum waste mill stocks, foundation raw materials such as glycerol and naphtha and environmental protection equipment and spare parts such as key components of wind power generation equipment; we will continue to adopt export interim tax rate on energy resource products such as coal, crude oil and metallic ore sand and those products with high energy consumption and large environmental influence such as wood pulp, coke, ferroalloy, billet and partial steel products.

The fourth is to appease the operation difficulties that fabric industry, steel products industry and fertilizer industry may face. In 2009, we will adopt the low interim tax rate to properly reduce partial import tariffs on productive raw materials with large domestic demands and continue to adopt the policy that some export taxes on steel products were canceled and the export seasonal duties on fertilizers such as urea were adjusted on December 1, 2008. In addition, we will reduce the special export tax rate on partial fertilizers and relevant raw materials.