CCTV News: On February 20, the State Council Information Office held a regular briefing on the State Council’s policies to introduce the relevant situation of expanding high-level opening up to the outside world and doing a good job in stabilizing foreign investment in 2025. At the press conference, Ling Ji, Vice Minister of Commerce and Deputy Representative of International Trade Negotiation, introduced the relevant situation of the "2025 Action Plan for Stabilizing Foreign Investment".
Lingji introduced that foreign investment plays a very important role in my country's development of new quality productivity and realizing Chinese-style modernization. The CPC Central Committee and the State Council attach great importance to stabilizing foreign investment. The Central Economic Work Conference emphasized that it is necessary to expand high-level opening up to the outside world, stabilize foreign trade and foreign investment. In accordance with the deployment of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, the Ministry of Commerce has taken active actions in conjunction with relevant departments and resolutely implemented it.
In order to further improve the work of stabilizing foreign investment in 2025, the Ministry of Commerce, the National Development and Reform Commission, together with relevant departments, widely collect common problems and demands reflected by foreign-invested enterprises through various channels such as foreign investment roundtables, foreign-invested enterprise service teams, and complaint mechanisms. On the basis of existing policies such as "24 Foreign Investment Articles", 20 policy measures have been proposed from four aspects: orderly expanding independent opening up, improving investment promotion level, enhancing the efficiency of open platforms, and increasing service guarantee efforts, forming the "2025 Action Plan for stabilizing foreign investment". On February 10, the State Council Executive Meeting reviewed and passed the "Action Plan". Yesterday, the Action Plan was officially announced on the Chinese Government website.
In general, the Action Plan has four prominent features: First, it sends out a positive signal of further opening up. The Action Plan proposes to expand the opening-up pilot in the fields of telecommunications, medical care, education, etc., promote the acceleration and increase of the national comprehensive pilot work on expanding opening-up of the service industry, further reduce the negative list of market access, and continuously expand institutional opening-up in the free trade pilot zones, and improve the level of outward-oriented economic development of national-level economic and technological development zones.
The second is to increase policy support. The Action Plan proposes that more high-quality foreign capital should be guided to invest in listed companies in my country for a long time, research and formulate policies and measures to encourage domestic reinvestment of foreign-invested enterprises, expand the scope of industries that encourage foreign-invested enterprises to use domestic loans, cancel restrictions on foreign-invested companies to facilitate the listing of innovative drugs, and support foreign-invested enterprises to participate in the pilot production of biological products.
The third is to actively carry out foreign investment promotion work. The Action Plan proposes that we should carefully design and implement the "Invest in China" series of activities, give full play to the role of the bilateral investment promotion working group mechanism with relevant countries, coordinate and coordinate the development of overseas investment promotion activities, optimize the relevant provisions on foreign investment and investment-based companies, optimize foreign investment and merger rules and merger transaction procedures, and support foreign-invested enterprises to participate in the new industrialization process and other measures.
Fourth, effectively solve the concerns of foreign-funded enterprises. The Action Plan proposes to include more foreign-invested projects in the list of major foreign-invested projects and key foreign-invested projects, clarify the standards for government procurement of domestic products as soon as possible, optimize volume-based procurement of drugs, continue to steadily expand the scope of unilateral visa-free countries, hold targeted bank-enterprise docking activities, and improve the trade facilitation level of foreign-invested enterprises.
The Action Plan clearly requires that all measures and policy measures will be implemented before the end of 2025, which fully demonstrates the confidence and determination of the Chinese government to adhere to high-level opening up and vigorously attract foreign investment. In the near future, in accordance with the deployment of the State Council, the Ministry of Commerce will also carry out the "Service and Guarantee of Foreign Enterprises" work nationwide. We will give full play to the role of foreign-invested teams at all levels, visit foreign-invested enterprises on the spot, understand the demands of enterprises on the spot, and promote the resolution of problems. If there are problems that cannot be solved on the spot, please ask the local government to report and coordinate step by step to effectively solve the reasonable demands of foreign-invested enterprises. In the next step, we will work with all regions and departments to earnestly implement the "Action Plan" and serve foreign-funded enterprises, creating good conditions for enterprises from all countries to invest in China and share China's development opportunities.
