It is a major national strategy for Hainan to build a free trade zone, and gradually explore and steadily promote the free trade port construction with Chinese characteristics. 

Hainan Free Trade Zone will operate across the entire island, with its strategic positioning being a "pilot area with comprehensively deepened reform and opening-up", "national experimental area for ecological civilization", "international tourism consumption center" and "national major strategic service area".

The development goal: By 2020, major progress will be made in the construction of the free trade zone, and openness to world trade enhanced. By 2025, a free trade port system with Chinese characteristics will be preliminarily established and the business environment will be one of the most preferable in China. By 2035, the operations of the free trade port with Chinese characteristics will become more efficient and the business environment will rank among the top in the world. By the middle of this century, Hainan will take the lead in realizing socialist modernization and form a highly market-oriented, internationalized, law-based and modernized society.

Hainan's free trade zone will carry out pilot work with the aim of achieving the following: building a modernized economic system, realizing a high-level opening to the outside world, increasing the amount of visitors to the island, enhancing the level of tourism consumption, serving major national strategies, strengthening social governing, building a first-class ecological environment, and improving talent development systems.