Recently, the General Administration of Customs, together with 24 departments including the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the National Development and Reform Commission, jointly deployed to officially launch the 2026 cross-border trade facilitation special action.
Compared with previous years, the number of pilot cities for this action has been expanded from 25 to 45, with 20 additional inland and central and western cities including Wuhan, Changsha, Xi’an, and Lanzhou, forming a comprehensive facilitation network covering coastal areas and inland hinterland.
Among them, innovative measures for customs clearance in the two key areas of cold chain fresh food and cross-border e-commerce have become the core starting point for breaking through industry congestion and activating the vitality of foreign trade.
In terms of global coverage, fresh cross-border cold chain foods, especially fresh agricultural products, have extreme requirements for transportation timeliness and temperature control.
In the past, cross-customs cold chain logistics often had to be shipped in separate trucks due to different regulatory processes and inspection standards. This not only increased logistics costs, but also easily led to the loss of fresh food.
This special operation directly addresses this pain point and launches a number of targeted measures to promote the quality and efficiency of cold chain customs clearance.
For imported cold chain food, the action clearly requires overseas production and cross-border transportation companies to establish a complete temperature control system and truthfully record temperature data throughout the production, storage and transportation process. Temperature records and transportation route information must be actively submitted when import declarations are made. The customs will implement an “intelligent verification + random selection” model to take disposal measures such as return and destruction of goods that fail temperature supervision in accordance with the law, and resolutely maintain the bottom line of food safety.
In Yongzhou, Hunan, a cold chain truck loaded with about 10 tons of fresh agricultural products such as oranges and ginger went directly to Shenzhen Wenjindu Port through Hunan’s “Fresh Food Special” model. The whole journey was successfully completed in just 7 hours, nearly doubling the time of previous separate truck transportation.
This model is an innovative pilot for this operation. Under the premise that regulatory requirements remain unchanged, multiple categories of cold chain goods such as fruits, vegetables, and eggs can be assembled in the same vehicle, significantly reducing corporate logistics costs while ensuring the freshness of fresh produce.
Ports such as Beijing and Guangzhou have promoted the “Fresh Food Express” green channel. Popular categories such as imported chilled aquatic products and tropical fruits can be cleared and delivered in as fast as 2 hours. With the help of “airside direct access” and “intelligent review” and other digital means, the originally cumbersome inspection process has been compressed to the extreme, so that “freshness” is no longer subject to customs clearance time constraints.
In terms of breaking the pain points of cross-customs returns, cross-border e-commerce, as a new engine for foreign trade growth, has long been restricted by problems such as “difficulty in returns, high costs, and complicated customs clearance.”
This special action to facilitate cross-border trade is centered on “improving customs clearance efficiency, reducing trade costs, and ensuring trade security.” Focusing on the four major tasks of goods trade, service trade, digital trade, and green trade, 29 specific measures have been launched, 11 of which are specifically targeted at cold chain fresh food and cross-border e-commerce, accounting for more than 37%.
The action clearly stated that it is necessary to break down the regulatory barriers across customs areas and promote the coordinated efforts of the 45 pilot cities to achieve “more precise supervision, more convenient processes, and more controllable costs”, marking that my country’s cross-border trade facilitation has entered a new stage of “promotion across the board and breakthroughs in key areas”.
Starting from April 1, 2026, the cross-customs area return model for cross-border e-commerce retail export goods will be promoted nationwide. Enterprises can handle return procedures at any qualified customs supervision workplace in the country without returning the goods to the original export customs area, which greatly reduces the cost and time loss of returns.
The person in charge of a cross-border e-commerce company in Wuhan said that after the policy was implemented, the company’s return costs dropped by about 40%, its capital turnover speed was significantly accelerated, and it became more confident to explore overseas markets.
Regarding the overseas warehouse business of e-commerce exports, the action fully implements the policy of “tax refund upon departure and accounting after sale”. Enterprises can apply for tax refunds once their goods leave the country without waiting for the final sales to be completed, effectively alleviating financial pressure; at the same time, the registration procedures for overseas warehouse enterprises for cross-border e-commerce exports are cancelled, further simplifying the process, and reducing institutional transaction costs.
Different from the past, this action focuses on cold chain fresh food and cross-border e-commerce as key areas of support. It not only focuses on people’s livelihood needs and ensures the freshness and safety of imported cold chain food, but also focuses on new foreign trade formats to help e-commerce companies “sell globally” and achieve both safety and efficiency improvements.
In terms of smart supervision, Wuhan Customs pioneered the “same site and same line” smart supervision model for express shipments at Ezhou Huahu Airport, intelligently connecting customs supervision workplaces with the sorting areas of express companies. Import and export express shipments can share the sorting line with domestic express shipments, reducing customs clearance time by 67% and reducing overall corporate costs by 30%.
This model has been promoted to the world as an innovative case by the World Customs Organization and has become a business card of China’s smart customs.
Breaking regional barriers and building a new ecology. One of the highlights of this special action is the joint efforts of 45 pilot cities, covering coastal hubs and inland hinterlands, breaking regional barriers and building a global convenience network.
Supporting the efficient operation of this network is the in-depth construction and technological innovation of digital and intelligent ports.
The “single window” for international trade continues to upgrade, adding 87 new business-friendly functions such as self-declaration and self-entitlement of tax exemptions and exemptions, and pre-tax refunds for overseas warehouses. It has interconnected electronic data such as certificates of origin with 15 countries and regions to achieve “more data, less business”; ports such as Ningbo and Guangzhou
AI smart document review and smart map review technology are widely used to greatly improve customs clearance efficiency and reduce manual intervention; at the same time, the General Administration of Customs has strengthened joint incentives for AEO advanced certification companies. More than 3,200 companies have benefited and received multiple supports in terms of financing credit, export credit insurance, etc.
The various measures of the special action quickly transformed into a real sense of gain for the enterprise.
Hunan’s “Fresh Food Special” model has reduced corporate logistics costs by one-third, greatly improved customs clearance time, and significantly reduced fresh food loss rates, effectively alleviating financial pressure and allowing companies to focus on expanding overseas markets.
From a macro level, the special action is effectively promoting the transformation of my country’s foreign trade from “scale growth” to “quality improvement” by deepening innovation in customs clearance supervision, improving cross-border logistics efficiency, and promoting interconnection of standard rules. This is not only a specific practice to optimize the port business environment, but also an important measure to smooth the domestic and international dual circulation and maintain the multilateral trading system.
On the premise of ensuring food safety and trade safety, the special action takes institutional innovation as the core and is supported by digital intelligence empowerment to accurately solve the customs clearance congestion and cost pain points in the cold chain and e-commerce fields. It not only provides enterprises with a “burden reduction gift package”, but also activates a pool of spring water for the development of foreign trade.
