Two-way financial opening-up to expand more this year

Officials: Stronger domestic-overseas market links will seek to attract foreign investors

China will work to further expand its financial opening-up this year as part of its efforts to attract more foreign investment and bolster the world's second-largest economy, officials and experts said on Friday.

Xu Zhibin, deputy director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said China will steadily promote the two-way opening of the capital market and continue to strengthen the interconnection between domestic and overseas financial markets.

"We will steadily expand the institutional opening-up in terms of rules, regulations, management, standards and expand the scope and varieties to attract more foreign investors to invest in China's financial market," Xu told a roundtable on Asian financial market development and financial globalization on Friday during the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2024.

Held in Boao, Hainan province, the forum kicked off on Tuesday and concluded on Friday.

To further expand financial opening-up, China will support high-quality Chinese enterprises to go public overseas and issue offshore bonds for financing. And it will also encourage China's sovereign wealth funds, financial institutions and other financial entities to carry out outbound investments in an orderly manner, so as to effectively improve the efficiency of the utilization of both international and domestic resources, Xu said.

More efforts will also be made to further improve the system for foreign investment management based on pre-establishment national treatment and negative list, and introduce more policies to facilitate cross-border investment across the globe.

During the roundtable, Lkhagvasuren Byadran, governor of the Bank of Mongolia, highlighted the importance of deepening regional financial cooperation, calling for more steps to strengthen monetary cooperation to facilitate trade.

"I believe that establishing a comprehensive framework, including smaller Asian countries, would benefit economies by promoting liquidity in the market and by enhancing the facilitation of regional trade," Byadran said.

Carl Fey, professor of strategy at BI Norwegian Business School, spoke highly of China's ongoing efforts to expand high-standard opening-up. "The progress is very impressive in the right direction."

Ben Simpfendorfer, a partner at consultancy Oliver Wyman, noted many Chinese investors are seeking to expand their overseas investment, which will also help promote globalization.

"We're starting to see signs of Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers beginning to invest in production (overseas)," he said. "These types of investments are really important to globalization because we need to move beyond just pure exports into regional investments."

Zafar Uddin Mahmood, policy adviser to the secretary-general of the Boao Forum for Asia and former special assistant to the Pakistani prime minister, said the Pakistani government hopes that China's financial — and business-related enterprises can visit Pakistan to realize the wide range of growth opportunities in the country.

"Chinese financial institutions are very welcome in Pakistan," he said. "For example, Chinese banks can set up branches and other relevant companies that can engage with the so-called non-banking financial services."