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Cai Jian [2025] No. 342 is a joint Ministry of Finance / Ministry of Commerce notice establishing a competitive-selection subsidy scheme that channels central fiscal transfers to roughly 15 Chinese cities building out "internationalised consumption environments" — service infrastructure aimed at inbound tourists, foreign residents and foreign merchants (payment access, signage/language, duty-free retail, hospitality standards). Selected "international consumption center cities" (a pre-existing tier — see the related 2025-03 State Council document forwarding MOFCOM's "Measures to Support the Cultivation and Construction of International Consumption Center Cities") receive RMB 200m each over the two-year trial; other pilot cities receive RMB 100m each. The notice explicitly names catering, accommodation and retail as priority beneficiary sectors ("丰富入境旅游产品供给，支持餐饮、住宿、零售等重点商户"), alongside sports venues, cultural-tourism integration, and digital/green/ smart consumption-scenario upgrades.
This sits within Beijing's broader 2023-25 turn to demand-side fiscal stimulus (equipment-renewal trade-in subsidies, ultra-long special treasury bonds, policy-based financial instruments) as a partial offset to the property-led slowdown — see the china-domestic-demand-stimulus theme. Unlike the manufacturing- and infrastructure-facing instruments already filed under that theme, this action is service-sector and inbound-consumption specific, and is explicitly framed around foreign visitors/merchants rather than domestic households, which is why GTA logged it as a state-aid intervention with cross-border competitive effects (hospitality/retail service providers in pilot cities receive a direct subsidy foreign competitors in non-pilot cities do not).
Severity is set low (2/5) and quant-based: the RMB 100-200m per-city transfer is a modest sum relative to national fiscal stimulus lines (cf. multi-billion-RMB equipment-renewal or policy-bank instruments in the same theme), and the measure is service-sector/consumption- facing rather than a trade-control or industrial-capacity subsidy.
operators in the ~15 selected pilot cities; foreign-owned hotel and restaurant chains operating in those cities are eligible recipients if selected under provincial implementation plans.
transit expansion, duty-free retail growth) rather than export competitiveness — limited direct read-through to trade flows or Section 301/CVD-style overcapacity arguments.
for the final pilot-city list and per-city allocation detail.
allocations were not disclosed in the notice itself; pending provincial announcements.
tier (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Chongqing per the 2025-03 State Council document) fully overlaps with this notice's pilot-city cohort, or whether additional cities are added under the "other cities" RMB 100m tier.