(Yicai) Aug 4 -- China’s free trade zones took a series of steps to further open up trade and investment last year that helped to steady trade and foreign direct investment. FDI into the FTZs was CNY222.52 billion (USD31 billion), accounting for 18.1 percent of all overseas investment in the country, a new report shows.

The 21 pilot FTZs’ share of China’s total trade hit 17.8 percent in 2022, after climbing 14.5 percent to CNY7.5 trillion (USD1 trillion) from the year before, according to the report released by the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation at a forum today. That increase was 6.8 percentage points higher than the national average.

Actual use of foreign capital in high-tech industries in the FTZs surged 53 percent year on year, far exceeding the national average, the report also showed.

As the new international trade rules become more stringent and the geopolitical environment becomes more complex, the FTZs should be brave enough to explore the new heights of high-level opening-up, further enhance institutional opening-up, and actively match high-standard trade rules as much as possible, Yang Yudong, editor-in-chief of Yicai, said in response to the report’s findings.

Based on China’s national conditions, the zones should open up more broadly across more fields and in more depth, promote high-quality economic development at a high level, and inject new impetus into the global economic recovery, Yang said.

In terms of leading the opening-up, the negative list of foreign investment access in the FTZs has been trimmed seven times, and the special restrictive measures for foreign investment have been thinned from 190 in 2013 to 27, achieving zero manufacturing entries, expanding the service sector’s opening-up, and continuously improving the level of investment liberalization, Ma Chengfang, deputy director of the commerce ministry’s FTZ port construction coordination department, said at the third China Pilot Free Trade Zone Development Forum in Zhengzhou.

According to commerce ministry data, the FTZs have so far replicated and promoted 302 institutional innovations to specific regions across the country, involving investment and trade facilitation and financial openness and innovation, and promoting the continuous release of the dividends of reform.