Creating a favorable environment for attracting foreign investment

Recently, the State Council issued the "Opinions on Further Optimizing the Foreign Investment Environment and Increasing the Attraction of Foreign Investment", proposing specific measures from ensuring the national treatment of foreign-funded enterprises, strengthening the protection of foreign investment, improving the level of investment and operation convenience, increasing financial and tax support, and improving the promotion methods of foreign investment. The strength and practicality of these measures will effectively promote China's integration with high standard international economic and trade rules, deepen the reform of the foreign investment management system, and promote the construction of a world-class market-oriented, legal, and international foreign investment environment. Each region should strengthen policy support, formulate specific rules based on actual conditions, and strictly implement responsibilities.

Improving the quality of foreign investment utilization is an inevitable requirement for the high-quality development of China's economy. Our country's economy has entered a stage of high-quality development from a high-speed development stage, with the service industry as the dominant industrial structure and the industrial chain moving towards high-end, digital, and green development. Innovation has become the primary driving force, and the digital economy has become a new engine. It requires the use of foreign investment to not only focus on scale and speed, but also on quality and efficiency. One is to continue to leverage the driving role of foreign investment in China's technological innovation. Support foreign investment in establishing research and development centers, undertaking major scientific research projects, and collaborating with domestic enterprises to carry out research and industrialization applications. The second is to enhance the competitiveness of attracting investment in high-tech fields. The Opinion proposes measures to support the landing of foreign-funded projects in the biopharmaceutical field and encourage foreign-funded enterprises to conduct clinical trials of stem cell and gene therapy drugs. Thirdly, we will continue to expand the opening up of the service industry. We should continue to play a demonstrative and leading role in expanding the comprehensive pilot program for opening up in the service industry, first explore international high standard economic and trade rules, and become a highland of institutional openness. The fourth is to leverage the strong complementarity of regional resource endowments in China to promote industrial gradient transfer. The Opinion proposes to rely on open platforms such as free trade pilot zones, national level new areas, and national level development zones to encourage the exploration of industrial transfer cooperation through sharing mechanisms such as output value and benefits in the eastern, central, western, and northeastern regions, as well as border areas. The fifth is to improve the mechanism for normalized communication. Through specialized teams for foreign-funded projects and roundtable meetings for foreign-funded enterprises, a mechanism is established to provide timely, accurate, and personalized services for major foreign-funded projects and key foreign-funded enterprises, and to promptly address issues related to foreign investment in land, energy, labor, and cross-border capital flows.

Placing the protection of national treatment for foreign-funded enterprises in an important position in creating a fair competitive market environment. On the one hand, ensuring that foreign-funded enterprises enjoy equal treatment. The Opinion proposes to accelerate the revision of the Government Procurement Law, ensure the participation of foreign-funded enterprises in government procurement, clarify the standards for "production within China", and prohibit the establishment of additional conditions for foreign-funded enterprises to enjoy policies, and support the research and development of globally technologically advanced products by foreign-funded enterprises through first purchase orders and other means. On the other hand, we support foreign-funded enterprises to participate in standard setting. The Opinion points out that ensuring the participation of foreign-funded enterprises in the Standardization Technical Committee and encouraging foreign-funded enterprises to formulate standards and carry out standardization services will be conducive to promoting the internationalization of standards in China's industries, products, services, technology, and management.

Making the protection of the legitimate rights and interests of foreign investment an important aspect of building a legal business environment. One is to improve the international mechanism for resolving investment disputes. The Opinion puts forward higher requirements for the internationalization of dispute resolution mechanisms in high standard free trade agreements, and strengthens the working mechanism for improving international investment dispute response. The second is to strengthen intellectual property protection. The Opinion proposes important measures such as increasing the enforcement of intellectual property protection and cracking down on infringement. The third is to ensure policy stability, transparency, and predictability. The Opinion proposes that when formulating foreign economic and trade policies, attention should be paid to listening to the opinions of foreign-funded enterprises, enhancing transparency and predictability, and setting a reasonable transition period.

Make promoting the cross-border flow of personnel and data a key task in improving the level of investment and operation facilitation. The Opinion proposes further optimization of personnel entry and exit measures, providing convenience for the entry, exit, suspension, and permanent residence of foreign executives, technical personnel, and their families, which is conducive to the efficient allocation of global talent resources by foreign-funded enterprises. Exploring a management mechanism for secure and convenient cross-border data flow, improving the security assessment mechanism for important data and personal information exports, will effectively address the cross-border data flow demands of multinational corporations for global research and development, operation, and service.

Increase financial and tax support for key projects, areas, talents, and research and development. The Opinion proposes to strengthen the guiding role of the central special fund for foreign economic and trade development, strengthen local government funding support, increase support for foreign investment landmark projects, key industrial chains, and key areas, and especially encourage foreign-funded enterprises to continue investing in China with profits. At the same time, foreign R&D centers have been further strengthened to enjoy national technology innovation import tax policies, value-added tax refund policies for purchasing domestic equipment, as well as tax exemption policies for housing subsidies for foreign-funded enterprise personnel and children's education, effectively reducing the R&D innovation costs of multinational corporations.