China continuously expands high-level opening-up

By Peng Fei, People’s Daily
In the eyes of many foreign companies, investing in China means investing in the future.
A survey conducted by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade showed that over 80 percent of surveyed foreign-invested enterprises rated China’s business environment in 2023 as “satisfactory” or above.
In the annual China Business Climate Survey released by AmCham China in February this year, half of the 343 members surveyed placed China as their first choice or within their top three investment destinations globally.
With a continuously optimized business environment, foreign companies in China can better enjoy the opportunities brought about by the country’s high-quality development and high-level opening-up.
A sound business environment is crucial to high-level opening-up. At present, China is working to build a market-oriented and world-class business environment governed by a sound legal framework, so as to enhance its ability to attract domestic and international factors of production and resources.
The rule of law is the best business environment. Whether foreign companies will face discrimination and unfair treatment when participating in regional development and investing in related projects is a common concern of them.
Recently, an action plan aimed to further attract and utilize foreign investment was issued, proposing a series of pragmatic measures to make competition fairer, including improving the bidding system.
In recent years, China has enacted and implemented the Foreign Investment Law, made its legal system related to foreign affairs more open and transparent, and strengthened intellectual property right protection.
China has worked to improve its institutional framework, promoting higher-level opening-up on the basis of the rule of law. This has created a more stable, fair, transparent and predictable investment environment for foreign companies.
A country or region’s degree of openness to the outside world and its level of connectivity with the external environment to some extent decide its ability to attract foreign investment and are important parts of its business environment.
In 2013, the first edition of China’s negative list for foreign investment had 190 items. Currently, the national version of this list has only 31 items, while the version for pilot free trade zones has just 27 items. This contrast highlights China’s solid steps towards greater openness to the outside world.
The shortening negative list for foreign investment, the exploration of mutual recognition of standards with major trading partners, the high-quality implementation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, as well as the efforts made to promote institutional opening-up, achieve high-level alignment with international economic and trade rules, and advance a broader agenda of opening-up across more areas and with greater depth… All these endeavors will open up vast opportunities for the development of foreign companies, bringing new opportunities to the world with China’s new development.
The real test of how good a business environment is lies in the services provided. When a foreign entrepreneur first arrived in Shanghai, he needed to register and file taxes but could not find multilingual application channels.
In January this year, an English version of the International Services Shanghai website went into trial operation, providing not only consulting services for taxation, accounting, etc., but also integrating various information resources.
“I can even recommend this website directly to my grandmother when she travels to Shanghai. I no longer have to worry about translating a large amount of information,” said the entrepreneur, highlighting the progress in Shanghai’s government services and the optimization of China’s business environment.
Establishing a round-table conference system for foreign-invested enterprises, implementing five measures to facilitate foreigners coming to China, solving mobile payment issues for foreigners in China…These services address practical problems for foreign companies and personnel, and will help fully unleash their innovation vitality.
China has become a synonym of the best investment destination, and that the “next China” is still China.
In the future, China will take multiple measures and make unremitting efforts to continuously improve its business environment and steadily promote higher-level opening-up.
It is believed that the country will continue to be a hot destination for global investment, and make new and greater contributions to global development.