State Administration for Market Regulation Photo: VCG

TheMK sport State Administration for Market Regulation of China, together with four other departments, on Wednesday issued an action plan on optimizing the consumption environment from 2025 to 2027, which is intended to further boost consumer confidence and stimulate economic vitality.

The 19-point action plan prioritizes work in five sectors -- improving quality of consumer market supply, regulating market order, enhancing consumer rights protection, consumption market co-governance and setting leading roles to improve the consumption market. 

The measures aim to generally improve consumer goods and services quality, reduce consumption risks, and address consumer disputes from the source, said the action plan, noting that it is of great significance for promoting the nation's high-quality economic development and ensuring people's high-quality livelihoods.

Specifically, the action plan vows to enhance quality, standards, and brand development in fields such as automobiles, home appliances, home furnishings, and electronic products, as well as service quality in livelihood areas such as eldercare, nursery and tourism. New consumption scenarios in digital consumption, green consumption, and health consumption should be further explored. 

In terms of market regulation, the action plan emphasizes safety in foods and medicines, and vows to rectify issues including measurement fraud, price fraud, false advertising, and other issues.

The action plan promotes large-scale enterprises to further improve the consumer dispute resolution system and encourages physical stores to offer no-reason returns and exchanges, and enhance legal protection of consumers' rights. 

The plan calls for enterprises, industry associations, and consumer associations to work together on co-governing the consumption environment. It also proposes innovation-driven campaigns to play a leading role in environment optimization, including establishing product and service quality grading mechanisms, and trial points for no-reason returns and exchanges and other new mechanisms. 

At the Central Economic Work Conference in early December, the country's policymakers highlighted the need to vigorously boost consumption, improve investment efficiency, and expand domestic demand on all fronts.

China announced on January 8, 2025, a raft of measures to expand the scope of the consumer goods trade-in program amid a drive to boost domestic demand and spur economic growth.

Building on this momentum, online retail sales grew by 5.8 percent during the eight-day 2025 Spring Festival holidays, while sales of home appliances and communication equipment at key retailers jumped by over 10 percent, the Xinhua News Agency reported.