investment in the manufacturing sector from 1 November. The 2024 version of the Foreign Investment Access Negative List will reduce the number of restrictions from 31 to 29, removing all restrictions in the manufacturing sector.

The two areas newly opened to foreign investors are the printing and application of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) processing techniques and the production of herbal medicine secret recipes.

According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, the actual use of foreign capital in manufacturing in the first nine months of this year reached 179 billion yuan ($25 billion), with high-tech manufacturing accounting for more than 77 billion yuan, up 1.5 per cent from the same period last year.