On China's Diplomacy

Excerpts from the Report on the Work of the Government (2020)

I. A review of our work in 2019 and the first few months of 2020

We achieved fruitful outcomes in pursuing China’s major country diplomacy. We successfully hosted the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation and other major diplomatic events.

President Xi Jinping and other Party and state leaders visited many countries and attended major international events, including the G20 Leaders’ Summit, the BRICS Leaders’ Meeting, the Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit, the East Asian leaders’ meetings on cooperation, the China-EU Summit, and the China-Japan-ROK Leaders’ Meeting.

We played an active role in the development and reform of the global governance system, and promoted the building of a human community with a shared future. We successfully pursued economic diplomacy and cultural and people-to-people exchanges. China made important contributions to the advancement of world peace and development.

II. Promoting higher-standard opening up and stabilizing the overall performance of foreign trade and foreign investment

Faced with changes in the external environment, we must stay committed to opening our door wider to the world, keep our industrial and supply chains stable, and make opening up a catalyst for reform and development.

We will stabilize the overall performance of foreign trade.

To help businesses get more orders and keep their employees on, we will increase credit supply, extend the coverage of export credit insurance, lower compliance costs for imports and exports, and support the domestic sale of export products.

We will accelerate the growth of cross-border e-commerce and other new forms of business, and enhance our international shipping capacity. We will advance a new round of trials for innovative development of trade in services. We will make good preparations for the third China International Import Expo, work actively to expand imports, and foster a large globally-oriented market of higher standards.

We will step up utilization of foreign capital.

The negative list for foreign investment will be significantly shortened, while a negative list will also be drawn up for cross-border trade in services. We will advance reform and opening up in special economic zones. We will grant greater autonomy in reform and opening up to pilot free trade zones, open new pilot free trade zones and integrated bonded areas in the central and western regions, and launch further comprehensive trials on opening up the service sector. The development of a free trade port in Hainan will be accelerated. We will foster an enabling market environment in which all companies, Chinese and foreign, are treated as equals and engaged in fair competition.

We will focus on quality in the joint pursuit of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Staying committed to achieving shared growth through consultation and collaboration, we will uphold market principles and international rules, give full scope to enterprises as the main actors, and work with our BRI partners for mutually beneficial outcomes. We will guide the healthy development of outbound investment.

We will promote liberalization and facilitation of trade and investment.

We will firmly safeguard the multilateral trading regime, and actively participate in reform of the WTO. We will work for the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and advance free trade negotiations with Japan and the Republic of Korea as well as other countries. We will work with the United States to implement the phase one China-US economic and trade agreement. China will continue to boost economic and trade cooperation with other countries to deliver mutual benefits.