Attracting comparatively little notice in the midst of its trade war with the US, China’s new foreign investment law, which the National People’s Congress approved in March 2019, will come into effect on January 1, 2020.
For such an important statute, first drafted back in 2015, expectations were high among reformers in China and among international investors that the fruits of Beijing’s efforts over so long a gestation would yield a quantum change to China’s foreign investment policy regime.
The new law and its implementing regulations — which were published only in November 2019, leaving just one month for the business community to file comments and for Beijing to incorporate any modifications before the law becomes effective — do signal an improvement. But the reality is that China’s posture towards foreign investment will still be significantly out of sync with global best practice.