"Relaxation," "win-win," "equal treatment"... Recently, China's Ministry of Commerce stated at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office that it will roll out a series of new measures to encourage foreign investment, among which many eye-catching keywords have drawn widespread attention from foreign media. "China promises to open the door to investment!" Germany's Handelsblatt reported on August 18 that this means foreign-funded enterprises in China will usher in a more open investment environment.

Relax foreign investment market access and build the "Invest in China" brand. Multinational companies are direct participants in China's development. While continuously achieving their own development in China, they provide important support for China's high-quality development and build bridges for China's deep integration into global industrial and supply chains. Therefore, China attaches great importance to multinational companies investing and doing business in China, has introduced a series of measures to expand high-level opening up, and actively promotes the implementation of these measures to deliver tangible results and enhance the sense of gain of foreign-funded enterprises. China will continue to relax foreign investment market access, revise and release a new version of the negative list for foreign investment access as soon as possible, and achieve "zero" restrictive measures in the manufacturing sector nationwide; promote the orderly expansion of opening up in fields such as telecommunications, the internet, education, culture, and healthcare, and promote pilot demonstrations of expanded opening up in the service sector; revise the Catalogue of Industries for Encouraging Foreign Investment to further add encouraged items... Recently, new favorable policies for foreign investment have sparked heated discussion in foreign media. "Foreign-funded enterprises may trigger a wave of listings in China," reported German financial website. It is foreseeable that these measures can place the investments of Chinese and foreign companies "on the same level playing field."

Continuously improve the management system and use investment to achieve "incremental growth and quality improvement." Attracting and utilizing foreign investment is an important part of China's opening up. In recent years, China's reform of the foreign investment management system has continued to deepen, driving the scale of foreign investment attraction to repeated record highs and the quality of foreign investment attraction to continue improving. From January to July 2024, 31,654 new foreign-invested enterprises were established nationwide, a year-on-year increase of 11.4%, continuing the trend of relatively rapid growth in newly established foreign-funded enterprises since 2023, indicating that foreign investors still remain optimistic about the long-term prospects of investing in China. At the same time, the structure of foreign investment attraction has continued to optimize, with the proportion of actual use of foreign capital in manufacturing and high-tech manufacturing increasing by 2.9 and 2.6 percentage points respectively compared with the same period in 2023. This shows that foreign investors are actively adjusting their investment layouts in relevant fields, which is consistent with China's general trend of accelerating the development of new quality productive forces and deeply advancing new industrialization. A survey report by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China shows that surveyed enterprises generally believe they can obtain relatively high investment returns in China, and 90% of American-funded enterprises are profitable in China. Foreign-funded enterprises can not only enter China but also develop well in China, which has become an important driving force for multinational companies to continue increasing investment in China.

High-quality development empowers and strengthens the confidence of more foreign-funded enterprises. In the first half of 2024, China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 5.0% year on year, the economy operated generally steadily and made progress while maintaining stability, new growth drivers grew faster, and new progress was made in high-quality development. The Decision of the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed steadily expanding institutional opening up. China will proactively align with high-standard international economic and trade rules, and achieve compatibility and mutual recognition of rules, regulations, management, and standards in areas such as property rights protection, industrial subsidies, environmental standards, labor protection, government procurement, e-commerce, and finance, creating a transparent, stable, and predictable institutional environment. Many foreign-funded enterprises have said one after another that China is the world's manufacturing center, the world's second-largest consumer market, and one of the most innovative frontier markets. They are full of confidence in the prospects of China's economic development and are willing to continue investing in China. This confidence from the outside world stems not only from the steady and sustained progress and high-quality development of China's economy, but also from China's super-large market scale, complete industrial system, high-quality human resources, and a first-class business environment that is market-oriented, law-based, and internationalized.

At present, China is comprehensively advancing Chinese modernization and accelerating the development of innovation-led new quality productive forces, which will bring unlimited market opportunities and incomparably broad development prospects to enterprises of all countries. Looking to the future, more foreign-funded enterprises will invest in China and take root in China, writing more stories of moving forward together and achieving win-win development.