China gets serious about foreign investment

The State Council has released the most concrete and effective support for foreign investors that we've seen in years.

• The guidelines, released on Sunday, contain 24 measures to improve the business environment for foreign investors and multinational companies (Gov.cn 1).

The clarity and level of detail in these guidelines is unprecedented:

• The State Council released high-level documents to attract and regulate foreign investment in August 2017, June 2018, and November 2019 – but all three were vague, lofty task lists that central government agencies failed to fully implement (Gov.cn 2, 3, 4).
• Meanwhile, a fourth task list was issued in August 2020, but only by the State Council's general office, affording the document less authority (Gov.cn 5).

But, but, but: The new guidelines in and of themselves aren't sufficient to improve the business environment.

• Any meaningful progress will depend on the effectiveness of central and local government agencies in implementing the guidelines.

Get smart: To measure how serious the government is, it will be important to see how quickly government agencies release implementing measures.

Call us optimistic: Government ministries responded with unprecedented speed to the State Council's recent call to improve the business environment for private businesses.

• We expect something similar in this case as well.