'China is already a success story,' Foreign Business Leaders

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, September 09, 2003

'China is already a success story,' Foreign Business Leaders

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Foreign business leaders and officials attending the ongoing 7th China International Fair for Investment and Trade said Monday in Xiamen that China has been an important source of stability and growth in the world economy given the slowdown of economic growth worldwide.

"China's course over the past decades suggests that the world now faces a new reality: a reality of a huge, rapidly modernizing, but still relatively poor economy, operating at full throttle in global markets, increasingly able to perform economic tasks that formerly could only be handled by the wealthiest and most advanced industrial economies," said Dr. Robert Kapp, President of US-China Business Council, when delivering a speech at the International Investment Forum 2003.

"From the standpoint of foreign investment, China is a success story," Kapp said.

China has absorbed 52.7 billion US dollars of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2002, overtaking the United States as the No.1recipient of FDI, according to the statistics from the Ministry of Commerce.

The fact is "indeed a sign that much in China has gone very well indeed, and that China is now a very good place to invest", from many standpoints, Kapp said.

Kapp said China has reaffirmed its determination to continue the process of economic reform and integration with global commercial practices by joining the World Trade Organization (WTO)on demanding but ultimately beneficial terms.

China's decision to join the WTO, its impressive rate of economic growth, and the emergence of a large domestic market, "has further encouraged foreign firms to integrate China into their global business strategies", he said.

Foreign officials like Sir Stephen Brown, Group Chief Executive of British Trade International (BTI), and Dale D. Marshall, M.P., Minister of Industry and International Business of Barbados also gave speeches during the forum.

Sir Stephen said China "has been an important source of stability and growth in the world economy", particularly in some of the high tech sectors.

He quoted BTI's statistics as saying that more than 170 Chinese companies already invested in the United Kingdom with a further 100 from Hong Kong including the UK's largest single inward investor, Li Ka Sing.

Marshall said he hoped that China would continue its contributions to the development of the Caribbean and also implement policies to encourage investment in the region from China.

However, business leaders from overseas said China still faces tough challenges as the country's domestic system of capital accumulation and allocation have not matured as rapidly as other key sectors of the economy have.

"If more than half of China's foreign trade is accounted for by foreign invested firms, then less than half of this great nation's trade is accounted for by domestically-developed companies," said Kapp, "the disproportion is self evident."

In some fields foreign brands almost completely dominate China's market while in other fields struggles aiming to protect or nurture Chinese-made products by directly or indirectly making foreign companies' progress more difficult continue to this day, he said.

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