English English

By Yin Lei

The China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone (SHFTZ) has attracted over 100 billion U.S. dollars of foreign investments in the past five years, said a report of Xinhua News Agency on Monday.

This pilot free trade zone, established in September 2013 and then expanded in 2014 to cover an area of 120.72 square kilometers, has been a trailblazer in China’s efforts to deepen its reform and opening-up.

Since its creation, the SHFTZ has attracted foreign investments with an aggregate contract value of 110.24 billion U.S. dollars, statistics available up to June 2018 showed.

Institutional reform has been a vital driver for these robust capital inflows.

In September 2013, the SHFTZ unveiled China’s first negative list for foreign investors, which included 190 special administrative measures for an array of business fields. The latest version updated in 2018 had reduced this number to 45.

For investments to sectors other than those identified in the negative list, a registration-based system applies, allowing a foreign-invested company to get registered within only one working day, according to Shen Weihua, an official of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce.

As of June 2018, a total of 8,696 foreign-invested companies had been founded in the SHFTZ with an aggregate of 22.13 billion U.S. dollars already paid in. Of these companies, over 98 percent were set up under the registration-based system.

Services are prospering in the SHFTZ. From January to October of this year, 340 service companies had been set up in fields not accessible to foreign investments in the past, driving the total number of service businesses in the SHFTZ to 2,744.