The executive meeting of China held on the 23rd proposed that it is necessary to stabilize foreign investment as an important force to do a good job in this year's economic work and consolidate the confidence of foreign investment in the development of China.
At present, China is facing challenges in attracting foreign investment. On the one hand, global cross-border investment is generally weak, and many developing countries and emerging economies are competing to relax investment restrictions, and the competition for investment is becoming increasingly fierce. On the other hand, the United States and other Western countries have pursued strategies such as "decoupling" and "de-risking", which has made some foreign companies have no worries when making investment decisions, which has brought obstacles to China's attraction of foreign investment.
According to official data, in 2023, 53,766 foreign-invested enterprises will be newly established across the country, a year-on-year increase of 397%；The amount of foreign capital actually used is 11,339100 million yuan, down 80%。In January this year, the actual use of foreign capital in the country increased by 20 percent month-on-month4%, but still down compared to the same period last year.
The plan of the year lies in the spring. China's deployment of foreign investment at this time is conducive to seizing the important time window in a timely manner and taking the lead in the global investment competition.
The executive meeting pointed out that foreign investment is an important force to promote the common prosperity and development of China's economy and the world economy. It is necessary to stabilize foreign investment as an important force to do a good job in this year's economic work, strengthen service guarantees in expanding market access, optimizing the fair competition environment, and smoothing the flow of innovative factors, continue to create a market-oriented, law-based, and international first-class business environment, consolidate the confidence of foreign investment in China's development, and improve the quality and level of investment cooperation.
Wang Xiaohong, a researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said that a good business environment is the core competitiveness of attracting foreign investment. Starting from optimizing the business environment is the key to stabilizing foreign investment.
In recent years, China's business environment has improved significantly. According to a survey by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the satisfaction of surveyed foreign-funded enterprises with China's business environment continued to increase, of which more than 90% of the enterprises were "satisfied" or above with indicators such as "cross-border**" and "market access".
However, Wang Xiaohong pointed out that there is still a gap between China's business environment and the world's first-class level, and there is a lack of information sharing mechanism between various departments.
The expansion of market access, the optimization of the fair competition environment, and the smooth flow of innovation factors proposed by the executive meeting are several key areas to improve the business environment. For example, in terms of expanding market access, China's manufacturing industry has basically completely opened up to foreign investment, and the next step is expected to focus on modern service industries and other areas that are conducive to industrial structure upgrading and market demand, and reasonably reduce the negative list for foreign investment access.
Gao Lingyun, a researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that minimizing communication and negotiation costs should also be an aspect of optimizing the business environment. In view of whether foreign-funded enterprises enjoy fair treatment in key aspects such as procurement, capital subsidies, and qualification licensing, special supervision can be deployed from time to time to respond to and solve various problems in a timely manner.
China has gone into the dark to improve its business environment. In addition to implementing five facilitation measures for foreign nationals to come to China, such as reducing the content of visa application forms, reducing visa fees in stages, exempting some applicants' fingerprints, exempting visa-free appointments, and piloting unilateral visa-free policies for countries such as France and Germany, China also regularly holds roundtables for foreign companies to understand the suggestions and demands of enterprises face-to-face and continue to promote solutions.
Wang Wentao, Minister of Commerce of the People's Republic of China, said that this year will continue to implement the "24 Articles on Foreign Investment" issued last year, promote the relaxation of foreign investment access, continue to optimize the foreign investment environment, and make good use of the roundtable meeting of foreign-funded enterprises and the collection and handling system of foreign-funded enterprises' problems.
Recently, many places in China have intensively deployed measures to improve the business environment and stepped up efforts to attract investment. Analysts said that with the support of a series of policies, China's absorption of foreign investment is expected to be stable and improving.
**: China News Network
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