On June 22, 2026, the State Council Information Office held an important press conference.
Vice Minister of Commerce Ling Ji announced that the Ministry of Commerce, together with the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Finance, jointly issued the “Action Plan for Utilizing Foreign Investment to Consolidate and Promote Optimization”, which proposed 15 policy measures focusing on five aspects: expanding market access, improving the convenience of foreign investment, improving the level of investment promotion, improving the foreign investment service guarantee system, and optimizing foreign investment management.
Let’s first look at the ‘basic market’ of foreign capital.
By the end of 2025, the number of foreign-funded enterprises in my country will reach 533,000, with an average annual growth of 4.5% compared with the end of 2020.
The scale of existing foreign investment has reached nearly 4 trillion US dollars, with an average annual growth rate of 3.6% in the past five years.
In 2025, more than 8,000 foreign-funded companies will increase investment in China, a year-on-year increase of more than 10%.
From January to May this year, nearly 4,000 foreign-funded companies made additional investments.
During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, the operating income of foreign-invested enterprises was 262.7 trillion yuan, and the profit was 21.4 trillion yuan. The average annual growth rate of both indicators was around 5%.
From January to May this year, the foreign trade import and export of foreign-invested enterprises reached US$866.3 billion, accounting for 29.1% of the country’s foreign trade import and export.
Since 2020, foreign-funded enterprises have contributed about 2.5 trillion yuan in tax revenue every year, accounting for about one-seventh of the national tax revenue.
It absorbs more than 30 million jobs on average every year.
From 2023 to 2025, the industrial added value of foreign-funded enterprises above designated size will maintain growth for three consecutive years.
The Ministry of Commerce uses the words “stable scale,” “stable operations,” “stable contribution,” and “stable expectations” to summarize the current situation of foreign investment. This is also the basis for the introduction of the 15 measures.
The “Action Plan” has made important breakthroughs in many fields.
In terms of the service industry, the first item is to ‘deepen the opening up of the service industry’.
Specific measures include steadily expanding the pilot program of opening up vocational skills training institutions, vocational schools, and high-level science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine universities to the outside world.
Support Beijing in improving the construction level of the comprehensive demonstration zone for the expansion of the opening up of the national service industry, and promote the pilot opening of key areas of the modern service industry such as the digital economy and medicine and health.
Promote the comprehensive upgrade of the arrangements for closer economic and trade relations between the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao, and increase the opening up of the service industry to investors from Hong Kong and Macao.
The opening up of the service industry has moved from “point pilot” to “wide spread”, because China’s service industry accounts for more than 55% of GDP, but the degree of openness is much lower than that of manufacturing. Nowadays, these areas that were “inaccessible” to foreign investment in the past have opened up, and Beijing will become the frontier of opening up.
The opening up of the financial industry is the ‘highlight’ of the New Deal.
The “Action Plan” clearly states that on the premise of improving regulatory coordination and risk prevention and control, more foreign-funded institutions will be supported to use risk management tools including treasury bond futures to strengthen financial risk management.
Starting from April 24, 2026, qualified foreign investors have been allowed to participate in treasury bond futures trading. The purpose of trading is limited to hedging. This new policy will further expand the scope of participation.
When foreign institutions allocate RMB assets, treasury bond futures make up for the shortcomings of hedging interest rate risks, allowing foreign investors to make long-term allocations with greater peace of mind.
In addition, it also supports foreign-funded institutions to carry out fund investment consulting business in accordance with the law, optimizes cross-border business management, provides cross-border financing facilitation quotas for key foreign-funded companies, guides domestic banks to launch “customer-made” international settlement document services for large foreign-funded companies, optimizes pre-communication services before listing applications on exchanges, and supports qualified key foreign-funded companies in domestic listing and financing.
The opening up of the pharmaceutical industry has also made substantial breakthroughs.
The “Action Plan” proposes to promptly study and issue implementation details for segmented production of drugs to facilitate overseas drug marketing authorization holders to carry out cross-border segmented production of biological products and chemical drugs.
This is a “from 0 to 1” institutional breakthrough. Overseas pharmaceutical companies can place part of their production links in China to achieve “global configuration and local production.”
It is also proposed to speed up research and approval to further expand the scope of pilot areas for opening up in the field of biotechnology and wholly foreign-owned hospitals, support insurance companies to include more innovative drugs and devices in the scope of commercial insurance coverage, continue to encourage high-quality innovative drugs and devices to enter the Chinese market, and build an industry collaboration platform to facilitate the entry of drugs produced by foreign-funded enterprises into drug retail channels. From R&D, production to sales, the channels for foreign-funded pharmaceutical companies in the Chinese market are being fully opened.
In addition to the above three major areas, the “Action Plan” also provides solutions to three ‘pain points’ that foreign-funded enterprises have long been concerned about: foreign mergers and acquisitions, cross-border data flow, and foreign domestic reinvestment.
Accelerate the revision and promulgation of regulations on the merger and acquisition of domestic enterprises by foreign investors, optimize the merger and acquisition management process and consideration payment requirements; support free trade pilot zones and national pilot cities for expanding the opening up of the service industry to explore the development of scenario-based, field-level data export negative lists in more areas; implement preferential tax policies for direct investment by foreign investors with profit distribution, and include more reinvestment projects of foreign-invested enterprises into the list of major and key foreign investment projects.
The “Action Plan” also requires the full implementation of national treatment for foreign-invested enterprises and the promotion of the ‘Invest in China’ brand action.
The 15 measures send a clear signal: China’s determination to expand high-level opening up remains unchanged, its principle of treating foreign-invested enterprises equally and applying them equally remains unchanged, and its efforts to provide an excellent business environment for foreign-invested enterprises remain unchanged.
China remains the first among developing countries in attracting foreign investment and has always been the world’s major cross-border investment destination. The door will open wider and wider, allowing foreign investment to “come in, retain, and develop well.”
