China to increase support for foreign businesses to attract investment: official

An official with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said on Wednesday that the ministry will increase whole-process support for foreign-invested projects and will help to address issues facing foreign businesses in order to attract more foreign investment.  

During a roundtable meeting for promoting major foreign-invested projects, Ling Ji, vice minister of commerce and deputy international trade representative, said that the third plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China clearly stated that China will build a higher-standard open economy.

China will steadily expand institutional opening-up, expand proactive opening-up, and promote the orderly expansion of opening-up in telecommunications, as well as the internet, education, cultural, medical and other fields, according to Ling.

In terms of extending national treatment to foreign businesses, China will treat foreign companies equally in areas such as government procurement, large-scale equipment renewal, trade-in of consumer goods, and industry supervision, the official said. 

Representatives from nearly 20 major foreign-invested projects attended the roundtable meeting on Wednesday. One of the projects is German chemical giant BASF’s new Verbund site in Zhanjiang, South China’s Guangdong Province, one of the largest foreign-invested projects in China. 

Still under construction, the project will be BASF’s largest investment to date, as it will cost about 10 billion euros ($11.03 billion) upon completion, according to the company.  

Highlighting Chinese officials’ commitment to supporting the early completion of major foreign-invested projects, officials from MOFCOM, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Transport, the State Administration for Market Regulation and other departments responded to questions from foreign businesses about issues such as innovative drug registration and import qualifications at the meeting on Wednesday.  

While some foreign media outlets continue to smear the Chinese markets and claim that foreign businesses are leaving China, many multinationals remain committed to the vast Chinese market. For example, as reflected in BASF’s massive investment, German companies continue to increase their investment in the Chinese market. In the first half of 2024, Foreign Direct Investment in China from Germany reached 7.3 billion euros, compared with 6.5 billion euros for the whole of 2023, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing German central bank data.  

Chinese official data also pointed to stable foreign investment in China. In the first half of 2024, while total foreign investment in actual use dropped by 29.1 percent, in line with a global declining trend, the amount of foreign investment came in at a relatively high level at about 500 billion yuan ($70 billion), according to MOFCOM.  

Moreover, in the first half of 2024, there were nearly 27,000 newly established foreign-funded enterprises, a year-on-year increase of 14.2 percent, which reflects the vitality of foreign businesses still being set up in China, MOFCOM said earlier this month.