Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, February 19th Title: Greater efforts! 20 Notices on Stabilizing Foreign Investment in China

Xinhua News Agency reporters Xie Xiyao and Tang Shining

Selected independent opening up in an orderly manner, improve investment promotion level, enhance the efficiency of open platforms, and increase service guarantee efforts. The "2025 Action Plan for Stabilizing Foreign Investment" was released to the public on February 19, and 20 measures were proposed from four aspects.

At present, the uncertainty of the external environment has increased, and my country faces multiple difficulties and challenges in attracting foreign investment. The action plan uses pragmatic measures to send a clear signal to further expand opening up and increase efforts to attract foreign investment.

A series of measures have been taken to "subtract" the restrictions on foreign investment access. The plan proposes to further expand the pilot program of opening up in the telecommunications and medical fields in a timely manner; study and formulate an implementation plan for orderly expanding the independent opening of education and culture fields, timely announce it and implement it steadily; facilitate the accelerated launch of innovative drugs, optimize the volume-based procurement of drugs; and ensure the implementation of the "Measures for the Management of Strategic Investment of Foreign Investors in Listed Companies"... The action plan clarifies the "task book" in areas of foreign concern.

Make "addition" in the business environment. The plan proposes to continuously optimize the business environment and effectively implement the national treatment of foreign-funded enterprises. Research and formulate policies and measures to encourage domestic reinvestment of foreign-invested enterprises to promote more profits made by foreign-invested enterprises in China for reinvestment. Foreign-invested companies are allowed to use domestic loans to conduct equity investment, providing convenience for multinational companies to invest in and establish headquarters-based institutions in China. Optimize foreign investment merger rules and merger transaction procedures, improve merger management scope, and lower cross-border stock exchange thresholds.

"High quality" is the keyword of the action plan. A series of measures have focused on stabilizing the stock, promoting the increase and improving quality in the use of foreign capital. The plan clearly states that the catalog of industries that encourage foreign investment will be revised and expanded, the structure of foreign investment will be optimized, the foreign investment will be promoted to serve the high-quality development of my country's manufacturing industry, the foreign investment will be guided to invest in modern service industries, and the foreign investment will be supported to invest more in the central, western and northeastern regions.

Continuous optimization of the investment attraction structure is an important feature of my country's current attracting foreign investment. In January 2025, the actual use of foreign capital in my country's high-tech manufacturing industry accounted for 12.5% ​​of the actual use of foreign capital in the country, an increase of 0.8 percentage points from the whole year of 2024. The actual use of foreign capital in pharmaceutical manufacturing and scientific and technological achievement transformation services increased by 68.4% and 23.9% respectively. The plan also proposes to encourage foreign investment in animal husbandry related fields such as breeding, feeding equipment production, feed veterinary medicine production and enjoy national treatment. Support foreign-invested enterprises to participate in my country's new industrialization process, focus on introducing foreign investment in high-tech fields, and provide foreign-invested enterprises with more market opportunities and cooperation space. Encourage the elderly care services, culture and tourism, sports, medical care, vocational education, finance and other service industries to attract and utilize foreign capital to meet the needs of multi-level service consumption.

In terms of increasing service guarantee efforts, the action plan is based on protecting foreign investment rights and interests, improving the level of trade facilitation of foreign-funded enterprises, and allowing foreign-funded enterprises to be at ease, at ease and confident.

The action plan clearly states that it supports the inclusion of more foreign-invested projects in the list of major foreign-invested projects and key foreign-invested projects; formulate and issue relevant documents as soon as possible to clarify the standards for government procurement of domestic products, and ensure that products produced by enterprises of different ownerships in China are equally involved in government procurement activities; accelerate negotiations on mutual visa exemption agreements and continue to steadily expand the scope of unilateral visa-free countries.

On February 11, 2025, Tesla's Shanghai Energy Storage Super Factory was officially put into production in the Lingang New Area of ​​the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Fang Zhe

At the beginning of the new year, the spring breeze of openness warms people's hearts, and a number of foreign-invested projects are full of "new" meaning.

Tesla's Shanghai Energy Storage Super Factory has officially started production, and the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi's bio-raw pharmaceutical raw materials project is accelerating the promotion of the new R&D and manufacturing base project of China and Siemens Medical in Shenzhen... Since the beginning of the year, many major foreign-invested projects have been implemented, with distinctive characteristics of high-end, intelligent and green, demonstrating the firm confidence of foreign capital to be optimistic about China's development prospects.

The Ministry of Commerce released data on the same day showing that in January 2025, the actual amount of foreign funds used in my country was 97.59 billion yuan, a month-on-month increase of 27.5%. During the same period, the actual investment in China by the United Kingdom, South Korea, the Netherlands and Japan increased by 324.4%, 104.3%, 76.1% and 40.7% respectively.

As various measures are implemented and effective in 2025, a China committed to achieving high-quality development and firm open cooperation will surely inject more confidence and motivation into the world and bring more new opportunities for win-win cooperation.