China offers a wealth of opportunities (2)

Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli pledged at the forum on Thursday to maintain stable and healthy economic growth as well as accelerate opening-up policies.

Zhang said the government will strengthen protection for the investors' legal rights and improve services for foreign businesses.

The State Council issued a statement two months ago pledging to deepen economic structural reforms, including speeding up the opening of the capital account, improving the internationalization of the yuan, and simplifying administrative approval procedures.

In the first quarter, China's GDP growth slowed to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. The annual target growth set by the government is 7.5 percent this year.

Lian Ping, chief economist at the Bank of Communications, said that weaker economic growth is the "necessary price" paid for structural reforms.

"We're not pessimistic, although it shows weaker development momentum," Lian said.

Wang Tao, chief economist of China studies at UBS, wrote in a research note that China's importance as a market has grown significantly for almost all major trading partners over the past decade.

"How might China's importance as a market for different economies evolve in the future? It will of course depend on China's future growth as well as its success in rebalancing its economy to one less reliant on exports and investment," Wang said.

On Friday, Cai also urged countries to solve the Internet security issue based on mutual understanding.

"The Internet security issue is complicated," and countries need to seek common points to solve existing disputes, as their legal environments are quite different, Cai said.

Data from the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team and Coordination Center showed that in the first five months of the year, 13,408 overseas Trojan horses or bot-controlled servers - two popular hacking tools - hijacked around 5.63 million mainframe computers in China. Of those, 4,062 United States-based servers hijacked 2.91 million mainframe computers in China.

The US ranked first in both the number of control servers and the number of mainframe computers controlled in China.

"China pays great attention to Internet development and the governance experience from foreign countries. We hope to deepen the communication and cooperation with other countries in terms of combating cybercrime, improving the Internet legal system and strengthening public education," Cai said.

He also met with company executives from DreamWorks Animation SKG, Intel Corp, WPP Group, Lenovo Group Ltd and AOL Inc.