Country remains ‘magnet’ for world business
No matter how far the small number of China-bashing politicians in the United States go in their efforts to besmirch China’s optimized COVID-19 prevention and control policies, they are failing to dent global investors’ confidence in and zeal for the Chinese market.
Many foreign business councils in China have expressed that their member enterprises are arranging the itineraries for senior executives’ trips to China and rebooting relevant projects. Likewise, the executives of many of China’s export enterprises have itineraries for business trips overseas.
The foreign business community has immunity to the China-bashers’ lies about the world’s second-largest economy. Foreign entrepreneurs recognize the Chinese economy’s stability and scale provide a strong foundation for its long-term prospects, while its resilience and recovery capability ensure it has potential to tap in the near term. The government’s consistent efforts to improve the domestic business environment and dock the domestic market systems with those of the world market give practical support to consolidate these.
In 2020, the amount of foreign investment utilized in China increased by 6.2 percent year-on-year. In 2021, the growth rate reached 14.9 percent, breaking the 1-trillion-yuan ($148.1 billion) mark for the first time. And in the first 11 months of 2022, it had already exceeded the level of 2021, up 9.9 percent year-on-year. China’s foreign trade surged 1.9 percent year-on-year in 2020 — the only major economy in the world that saw positive growth in trade that year — 21.4 percent in 2021, and 8.6 percent, despite the impacts of the pandemic, over the first eleven months of 2022. These figures demonstrate that the Chinese market has remained a magnet for foreign investment. Now that the pandemic prevention and control measures have been adjusted enabling economic operations to gain steam, China’s foreign trade will see a robust rebound.
The many appeals of US enterprises for the US government to stop hindering their business operations highlight the extent to which the US political system has been poisoned by the toxicity of the China-bashers, if not how much the US economy and consumers are paying for that.
China’s status as a global market, major investment destination and source, manufacturing base, logistics hub and increasingly influential creative center are by no means condescending gifts from the US but a result of its own comparative advantages, that will only be strengthened with its higher-level opening-up and development.
The future of the global economic recovery hinges upon the extent to which countries are willing to work together to dismantle trade and institutional barriers, maintain the stability of global supply chains, shorten negative lists, align their development strategies and coordinate their macro-policymaking, all of which China has been promoting.
Editorial, China Daily
