China’s New Foreign Investment Law

Abstract

China’s legal framework for governing foreign investment has recently been considerably streamlined in comparison to its former self. The newly promulgated Foreign Investment Law of the People’s Republic tends to level the investment playing field in the country so that foreign investors can no longer enjoy significant privileges that have been unavailable to domestic firms and entrepreneurs. Operating a relatively nondiscriminatory mechanism, such as has been introduced, will in practice mean reliance on a negative list approach to confine inflows of overseas capital to specifically identify sensitive sectors. As China has committed its market to opening up on a much grander scale in the foreseeable future, the new foreign investment regime and accompanying ideology may not necessarily deter foreign investors from looking for opportunities in the foreseeable future. Keywords: China; foreign investment; negative list; market opening-up