The Ministry of Commerce held the 2015 National Foreign Investment Working Conference on May 5 in Beijing. The main task of the conference is to implement and carry out the spirits of the 18th National Congress and the Third and the Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Economic Working Conference, study the current trends of using the foreign investment and deploy the foreign investment work of 2015. The Assistant Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen attended and addressed the conference.
The conference pointed out that the scale of absorbing the foreign investment seeks improvement in stability and the quality is further improved. In 2014, the actual use of foreign capital reached US$128.5 billion, with an increase of 3.7% year on year, ranking the first in the whole world. The industrial structure continued to be optimized, the regional layout tended to be more reasonable and the operation of foreign investment enterprises remained stable. In the first quarter of 2015, the foreign investment attraction in China continued to maintain a sound situation and the actual use of foreign capital reached US$34.88 billion, with an increase of 10.6% year on year (not including the data of bank, security and insurance fields)
Wang emphasized that at present the foreign investment attraction of China is faced with larger pressure of domestic economic downturn and intense challenges of international investment attraction competition. But factors such as the domestic market with steady growth, the increasing production matching capacity, the advantageous comprehensive competitiveness and the profound participation in the global and regional economic cooperation still enable China to possess a comprehensive advantage to absorb foreign investment with a bright future.
Wang pointed out that focusing on the working goal of “stabilizing the scale and the speed of foreign investment and improving the quality of foreign investment”, the key work of the foreign investment attraction in 2015 is that: firstly, the scale should be stabilized, the structure should be adjusted and the quality should be improved; secondly, the breadth and the depth of the opening up should be constantly expanded; thirdly, the working concept and the working mode of the investment promotion should be improved; fourthly, the “combination of three laws” should be actively promoted and the Foreign Investment Law should be formulated; fifthly, the reform of the approval management system of foreign investment should be accelerated; sixthly, the duplicable pilot reform of free trade test areas should be popularized; seventhly, efforts should be made to build the national economic and technical development zones.
Attending the meeting were 120 people from provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the Central Government, municipalities with independent planning status and commercial department, relevant departments and units of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.