On January 20, 2013, Guangzhou’s mayor met members of the city’s political consultative conference. One of them, Cao Zhiwei, showed a chart of the approval process for an investment project. He called it the “Long March chart.” From the start of a project to its approval, he said, the process passed through 20 departments, needed 108 stamps and took 799 working days.
Cao said the process could be cut to 232 working days.