Investment Environment

China’s foreign investment during pandemic

China is committed to its national policy of opening up. The country’s opening to the outside world has continuously progressed. China’s open economy indicators now rank among the best in the world. According to Doing Business 2020 released by the World Bank, China moved up to the 31 place in the “Ease of Doing Business” rankings – a jump of 15 spots from 2019. Even in pandemic, the foreign investment flowing to China is growing.

China will introduce high-level trade and investment liberalization and facilitation policies, fully enforce the system for “pre-establishment national treatment and negative list management”, broaden the range and expand the scale of opening up on all fronts, relax restrictions on foreign investment in different fields including manufacturing, services and agriculture, protect the legal rights and interests of foreign investors, and create a level playing field in which domestic and foreign enterprises are treated equally and fair competition is encouraged, thus continuously enhancing China’s attractiveness to foreign investors.


Since the beginning of this year, to effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and stabilize the fundamentals of foreign trade and investment, China has introduced a range of policies to bail out enterprises facing difficulties and to offer tremendous support to market entities of all kinds, including enterprises with foreign investment, as they resume work. China, as a pathfinder for effective pandemic prevention and control across the world, has also been a frontrunner in resuming production and restoring normalcy.

Meanwhile, China has put the new Foreign Investment Law and its Implementation Regulations into effect. It has released two revised negative lists, one for pilot free trade zones and one for the rest of the country. It has also established the Hainan Free Trade Port, added three new members (Beijing, Hunan and Anhui) to the group of pilot free trade zones, and relaxed control over market access to services such as finance. As the actual national use of foreign capital rises, bucking the trends, China has become a haven of transnational investment.

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By Youly Consulting