BEIJING -- Premier Li Qiang on Wednesday underscored the need to enhance the business environment in China to constantly stimulate market vitality.

Li said during a State Council study session that improving the business environment is crucial to bolstering market vitality and enhancing the endogenous dynamics for development.

While advancing reforms in key areas and crucial sectors, the country should continue to create a top-tier business environment that is market-oriented, law-based, and internationalized to propel high-quality development, the premier said.

In the following steps, Li said more efforts will be made to safeguard fair market competition, eliminate regulations and practices that impede a unified market and fair competition, ensure that enterprises of all types of ownership participate in fair competition, and better protect the legitimate rights and interests of all types of business entities.

He demanded standardizing the discretion of administrative penalties, innovating regulatory methods, improving regulatory effectiveness, and creating a stable, transparent, standardized, and predictable rule-of-law environment.

More efforts should be made to strengthen alignment with high-standard international economic and trade rules, give full play to the role of stress tests on platforms such as pilot free trade zones, and produce more leading and landmark institutional innovations, Li said.

He urged improving government services so that people and businesses can feel actual change year by year. He said government services should comprehensively use new technologies, such as big data and artificial intelligence, to improve standardizing and facilitating government services consistently.