2019 foreign investment negative lists

The National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Commerce released the 2019 negative lists for foreign investment market access on Sunday.

The negative lists for foreign investment market access are revised by the Chinese authorities every year.

The new negative lists, one for the pilot free trade zones and the other for the rest of the country, have fewer restrictions compared with last year's lists. The negative list for the pilot FTZs this year reduces the access restrictions on foreign investors from 45 fields to 37, while the other general negative list reduces access restrictions from 48 to 40.

Several new opening-up measures have been introduced in key industries such as transportation, infrastructure, culture, value-added telecommunications, manufacturing and agriculture.

The Foreign Investment Law that was approved in March and comes into effect on Jan 1, 2020, stipulates that China implements pre-establishment national treatment and negative list management system on foreign investment, which is the basic legal guarantee for implementing the foreign investment negative lists.

With the deepening of opening-up to the outside world, the shorter negative lists will create more development opportunities for investors from all over the world.