Embassy says China will open doors wider to businesses

Chinese and US flags flutter outside the building of an American company in Beijing. [Photo/Agencies]

China will open up wider to the world, furnished with a world-class business environment, a Chinese embassy spokesperson said on Tuesday in response to a recent comment by the United States commerce secretary.

"China is actively advancing its high-level opening-up and making efforts to provide a world-class, market-oriented business environment governed by a sound legal framework," spokesperson Liu Pengyu told China Daily on Tuesday.

China is also working to ease market access further, treat foreign companies in the same manner as domestic firms, and safeguard and promote fair competition, and the country will only open its doors even wider to the outside world, he said.

On Tuesday, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, on the third day of her four-day China trip, said that some American companies have complained that China is "uninvestible", pointing to "actions that have made it risky to do business", according to a Reuters report.

The report said that the label was used by JP Morgan last year in a research note, in which it called Chinese internet companies uninvestible, which triggered a sharp fall in their stock prices, but later said that the term had been used in error.

Stephen Roach, former chief economist at Morgan Stanley, noted that Washington's top trade promoter's comments showed the "conundrum" she was in.

"Raimondo's conundrum: portraying fuzzy lines as sharp. De-risking versus decoupling; national security versus economic security; trade versus saving deficits. America's China strategy compromised by political economy fears," Roach wrote on social media on Tuesday.

Liu, the spokesperson, said that China and the US enjoy close economic ties and mutual benefit, and according to statistics from the US-China Business Council, nearly 90 percent of US companies operating in China are profitable, and most of them want to stay in China for development.

He was referring to the USCBC's 2022 Member Survey, conducted in June last year, of mostly large, US-headquartered multinational companies that have operated in China for more than 20 years.

It found that nearly 9 out of 10, or 89 percent of US businesses in China remained profitable in 2022, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite various challenges, 63 percent of respondents said that their profitability increased last year — a proportion unseen in more than a decade, and four-fifths of respondents reported that their China profit margins are the same or better than overall operations the previous year, which is another decade high, according to the survey report.

"These performance figures show the potential that the China market holds for US companies. If they are not able to participate in the China market and reap these benefits, they are at a global disadvantage compared to competitors who are," noted the report.

A week before Raimondo's current visit to China, board members of the USCBC, which represents 270 companies doing business with China, traveled to Beijing, underlining the "bedrock" role that businesses play in stabilizing bilateral relations and vowing to further cement the bond for mutual economic growth.

After a four-year hiatus, the executives visited Beijing to discuss the importance of a healthy, balanced US-China commercial relations with state and business leaders, according to releases posted on the trade body's website.

They met with Premier Li Qiang, who on Tuesday also met Raimondo.

"Whether we recognize it or not, the US-China Business Council and, more importantly, USCBC's members — in addition to Chinese investors in the United States — are the bedrock foundation of the bilateral relationship and our contributions to the continued peaceful development of those relations is fundamental," said USCBC President Craig Allen.

"That bedrock is strong and solid," he said at a gala event in Beijing on Aug 21 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the USCBC.