N Videos at Southern Metropolis Daily:

Since last year, the scale of China's utilized foreign investment has declined. What does the NDRC think about this? And how do you plan to proceed with priority tasks? Thank you. 

Wu Hao:

Thank you for your questions. Indeed, we also noticed that domestic and international media recently showed much interest in the amount of China's actual utilized foreign investment. I believe this reflects concerns over whether or not China will continue to expand openness. General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed repeatedly that China's door of opening up will not be closed, instead it will open even wider. China firmly champions and safeguards economic globalization. We believe that opening up is an important force for boosting globalization. As for the issue of utilized foreign investment that you just mentioned, we may interpret it from three dimensions: 

First, from a global perspective, fluctuation in global cross-border investment is normal. In recent years, with the intertwining of global turmoil and increasingly complex global economic conditions, fluctuation in global cross-border investment has intensified. In 2021, after reaching a comparatively high level, global data showed a sustained decline. In January of this year, the "Global Investment Trends Monitor" released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development showed that global cross-border investment had decreased by 18% in 2023 after excluding transshipment factors in multinational enterprise investments. In such a context, China has maintained a robust momentum in attracting foreign investment.

Second, viewing from a longer time frame, China's actual utilization of foreign investment in 2023 remained at a historic high. Since the reform and opening up, China's actual utilization of foreign investment has continued to increase, becoming an important investment destination for global transnational corporations. Despite some fluctuations in the numerical scale of foreign investment in China during 2023, an assessment from both quantitative and qualitative standpoints reveals a more objective picture. In terms of quantity, China's actual utilization of foreign investment exceeded 1.1 trillion yuan last year, ranking the third highest on record. In terms of quality, the structure of foreign investment utilization in China continues to improve. In 2023, the proportion of investment in high-tech industries reached 37.4%, an increase of 1.3 percentage points compared to 2022, and the proportion of investment in the manufacturing sector reached 27.9%, an increase of 1.6 percentage points.

Third, from the perspective of future trends, China has significant advantages in attracting foreign investment, offering vast opportunities. China is the world's largest and most promising market, continuing to release enormous demand in advanced manufacturing, new urbanization and the upgrading of a structure for consumption. At the same time, China has a good and stable policy environment and the most complete industrial system in the world, which can provide multinational companies with efficient and reliable industrial support systems. China's growing infrastructure network, abundant talent resources and rich innovative application scenarios create a good investment space for foreign companies to expand into new technologies, industries and business models. Last year, the number of newly established foreign-funded enterprises in China increased by 39.7%, fully reflecting the enthusiasm of foreign capital in sharing opportunities in the Chinese market and their confidence in future investment prospects.

We believe that for multinational companies, partnering with China means embracing opportunity, and investing in China means investing in the future. Moving forward, the NDRC will work with various regions and departments to advance high-level opening up in accordance with the decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee and the State Council. The focus will be on four aspects: First, we will steadily expand institutional opening up in terms of rules, regulations, management and standards to accelerate the creation of new hubs for opening up. Second, we will reasonably reduce the negative list for foreign investment entry, implementing measures to eliminate foreign investment restrictions in the manufacturing sector and further relaxing restrictions on foreign investment access. Third, we will continuously optimize the business environment, ensuring equal treatment for enterprises of various types of ownership and improving the direct communication mechanism for foreign-funded firms as well as resolving specific challenges encountered by foreign-funded projects during implementation and operational phases. Fourth, we will strengthen services for foreign-funded projects. We plan to roll out a new batch of major foreign-funded projects, strengthen the guarantee of project components and promote the inflow of foreign capital through flagship foreign-funded projects. Thank you!