State Media Flags Further Opening to Foreign Investment

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State media says that a raft of new policies to further open China to foreign investment can be expected to arrive in the near term.

The Xinhua News Agency’s Economic Information Daily says China plans to launch a raft of new policies to reduce the threshold for foreign investment, as well as accelerate the drafting of a new “Foreign Investment Law.”

According to Economic Information  the new policies will “make foreign capital, in particular foreign-invested enterprises in the high-end manufacturing sector, more favourably disposed towards investment prospects in China.”

The central government has sent repeated signals of late on the need to further open China to foreign investment, with MOFCOM announcing in early November that it would ease nationwide foreign investment restrictions by following the lead of the negative list system first trialled across the country’s 11 free trade zones.

In the weak of Trump’s official visit Beijing indicated that foreign investors would soon be allowed to grab majority ownership in certain domestic financial institutions.

According to Zhu Guangyao (朱光耀), vice-head of the Ministry of Finance, China will conduct trials of adjustments to foreign investment ratios for special-use vehicle and clean energy vehicle companies in the country’s free trade zones prior to June 2018.

With respect to legislation, China plans to accelerate the launch of a new “Foreign Investment Law” which has been in the works for nearly three years.

Jiang Chenghua (蒋成华), the head of investment law office of the Ministry of Commerce, said that the new legislation would focus on the “five emphases:” emphasis on expanding openness, emphasis on regulatory simplification and delegation of authority, emphasis on protect the lawful rights and interests of foreign investors, emphasis on encouraging and servicing foreign investment, and emphasis on fair competition between foreign invested enterprises and all other categories of market actors.