Commerce minister calls foreign investment 'essential' to modernization drive

Foreign investment utilization is essential to China's opening-up, and the government will address difficulties and issues reported by foreign companies in a timely manner while providing them with better supporting services, China's top commerce official said. 

In the past four decades of reform and opening-up, foreign investment has brought to China funding, advanced technologies, valuable managerial expertise and a large pool of talent needed in the modernization drive, playing a positive role in China's economic development, said Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao. 

The minister made the remarks at a symposium with foreign-invested pharmaceutical companies in Beijing on Thursday. 

The meeting was attended by 15 pharmaceutical companies and foreign business chambers,  including Takeda, Roche, General Medical and the American Chamber of Commerce in China and EU Chamber of Commerce in China. 

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, foreign companies have actively fulfilled their social responsibilities, contributing to and supporting epidemic control and prevention in China in various ways. They have also achieved their own development by sharing the opportunities and dividends in China's development, he said.

The official said China will move faster to foster a new development paradigm with domestic circulation as the mainstay and domestic and international circulations reinforcing each other, which will present broader development opportunities for foreign companies, during the country's 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25).