New supervisor of online deals to support internet companies

More efforts will be made this year to build a national supervisory platform for internet transactions to guide the healthy development of Chinese internet companies while supporting self-employed businesses to stimulate market vitality, said the State Administration for Market Regulation, China's top market regulator, on Thursday.

"Accelerated steps will be made to explore the application of new technologies such as big data, blockchain and artificial intelligence in the supervision of internet platforms, especially the construction of a national internet transaction supervision platform," said Luo Wen, head of the administration.

As the digital economy continues to develop, Luo said that the market regulator will improve the level of normalized supervision over internet firms to guide their healthy development.

"More efforts will be made to improve rules and regulations regarding the digital economy, as well as support systems like guidelines and standards, to send a clear signal to the market to stabilize expectations and boost confidence," he added.

Responding to a question regarding antitrust policy on internet companies, Gan Lin, deputy head of the SAMR and head of the State Anti-Monopoly Bureau, said that China insists on both development and regulation amid antitrust efforts.

"The ultimate aim is to continuously optimize market order and competition in the platform economy, and further stimulate innovation vitality and development momentum of platform companies, especially small and medium-sized ones," Gan said.

"In addition to administrative penalties, China's antitrust supervisory measures also include interview reminders, administrative consulting and rule guidance," she said.

China's digital economy has played a fresh role in driving new business models and economic growth over the past years. As ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm, a group of platform companies jumped on the artificial intelligence-related sector bandwagon this year.

A white paper released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think tank, also showed that the market scale of China's digital economy reached 50 trillion yuan ($7.2 trillion) last year, up 10 percent year-on-year.

On Thursday, the SAMR also pointed out that more measures will be made to support the development of self-employed businesses this year, which now number 116 million.

The administration will implement targeted cultivation and precise assistance for three different types of self-employed businesses, namely businesses in survival, growth and development phases, it said.