Xie Yingjun:

The floor is now open to questions. Please identify the media outlet you represent before raising your questions.

Zhejiang Daily Tide News:

Executives from various multinational companies, including Elon Musk, have recently visited China. They also consider the CCPIT to be an important destination during their visits. Therefore, we would like to gather more information. Mr. Ren, how do executives like Musk perceive the current business environment in China? What are their intentions for participating in this Chain Expo? Thank you.

Ren Hongbin:

Thank you for your question. Since the beginning of this year, the CCPIT has welcomed many executives from the top 500 companies and leaders of foreign business associations to China. It is widely known that most executives from the world's top 500 companies and leaders of foreign business associations come to China through invitations and coordination facilitated by the CCPIT. Upon their arrival in China, we arrange extensive exchanges for them with relevant departments, local officials, and enterprises. Based on the current situation, many foreign corporate executives and business association heads, including Musk, have expressed strong confidence in China's economic development during these conversations. They have affirmed their commitment to further deepening their presence in the Chinese market.

CCPIT conducted a survey among over 600 foreign enterprises in China in the first quarter of this year. According to the survey, satisfaction ratings on many indicators are above 80 percent, with 97% of the enterprises showing their satisfaction with foreign investment policies rolled out by the Chinese government since the fourth quarter of last year. Therefore, foreign enterprises in China are satisfied with the business environment in the country. 

We hosted the Global Trade and Investment Promotion Summit 2023 not long ago. Guests from many countries and international organizations, including President of the New Development Bank Dilma Rousseff, and WEF Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab, showed their confidence in jointly building an open world economy and the long-term positive trend of China’s economy in their speeches. 

Visits to CCPIT by multinational companies, in a sense, have reflected their recognition of our work in serving foreign enterprises. Since May of last year, according to the unified deployment of the Chinese government, CCPIT has established special working mechanisms for serving foreign enterprises to provide all-weather and whole-process services and actively spur foreign investment quality and quantity. 

Specifically, we have started a bottom-up direct channel to meet the demands of foreign-invested enterprises and respond to problems encountered by foreign-funded enterprises and foreign business associations in China in their production and operation. We have strengthened exchanges with foreign business associations and foreign-invested enterprises on a regular basis. We have organized enterprise symposiums and dialogues between governments and enterprises regularly, listened to and responded to the concerns of foreign enterprises in a timely manner, improved the business environment monitoring system, and released national and provincial business environment survey reports regularly. We have steadily promoted targeted services to attract investment. We have promoted local investment policies through the platform named Invest China and released over 4,000 investment projects. We have also organized multinational companies to visit places in China and done a good job in matching up projects to help them share opportunities and dividends of China's development. Multinational companies come to China to communicate with us; this is the first point I would like to talk about. Through special working mechanisms for serving foreign enterprises, we felt that foreign enterprises are full of confidence in China's development. 

Second, in communications with senior executives of multinational companies, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, we found that the Chain Expo is also an important issue of common concern. Everyone is very curious about the expo, which is the first expo focusing on supply chains in the world. We are also full of expectations about the expo. Many senior executives of multinational companies decided to participate in the expo during our talks, believing that the Chain Expo comes at an opportune time in the context of the economic integration of various countries. Everyone has shown great interest in the expo. 

President Xi Jinping instructed that CCPIT should stay true to its founding mission of serving Chinese and foreign businesses. We will keep President Xi Jinping’s words firmly in mind, advance our work with full strength, diligently perform our duties and work with domestic and foreign enterprises to build the first Chain Expo into a world-class platform for promoting trade and investment, turn it into a new window for China’s high-standard opening up, and take concrete actions to expand the prospects for the development of Chinese modernization. Thank you.