Full transcript of policy briefing of the State Council on Jan 16, 2015

Zhong Shan:

Fourth, outbound investment grew rapidly.

The government insists on laying equal emphasis on "bringing in" and "going global". Active efforts have been made to both attract foreign investment and encourage companies to invest overseas. In recent years, China's outbound investments have grown rapidly and made solid achievements.

In 2014, China's outbound investment had the following features.

1. The size of China's outbound investment was almost equal to inward FDI. China's non-financial outward direct investment has for the first time topped $100 billion, reaching $102.9 billion, an increase of 14.1 percent, making China still the third-largest outbound investor in the world. On current trends, China's outward investment will continue to grow faster than its utilization of foreign investment, which will shortly make China a net investor. In fact, I'm afraid that the size of China's outbound investment is larger than what I've said today. The main reason is that the method we previously used to calculate the outbound investment need to be adjusted. In future, we will establish a statistical deposit system for outbound investment, and the figure is likely to be much bigger than what I announced today. It is estimated that China's outbound investment will soon outgrow inward FDI and this will be a historic turning point for China.

2. China's investment in developed countries grew rapidly. Especially, China's investment in the US which rose by 23.9 percent and in the EU by 1.7 fold, both much faster than the overall outward investment growth.

3. Investment in services increased remarkably. The service sectors saw the most rapid growth of China's outbound investment. Investment in the sector grew by 27.1 percent, accounting for 64.6 percent of total investment. People often said Chinese outbound investment mainly went to the resource sector. But I have a number here. China's outbound investment in mining dropped by 4.1 percent, representing a declined share of just 18.8 percent.

Going forward, we will focus on implementing the strategy of "One Belt and One Road" as we further step up outbound investment and encourage the relocation of advantageous industries and excess capacity to countries along the "One Belt and One Road".

Zhong Shan:

Fifth, new dimensions have been created in multilateral and bilateral cooperation

We consistently adhere to the cooperation philosophy of mutual benefit and win-win results. We insist that we achieve our own development in the course of the world's development, and promote the world's common development with our own development. We have actively expanded opening up.

1. We made historic breakthroughs on the FTA front. The negotiations on China-South Korea FTA and China-Australia FTA have been substantially concluded. These two FTAs are so far the most influential, comprehensive and of best quality China has ever participated in.

2. We have made progress in participating in international trade and economic rule making. The APEC Economic Leaders' meeting resulted in over thirty major trade and economic achievements, including the Roadmap for the Free Trade Area of Asia-Pacific. We pushed the WTO to organize to review and approve trade facilitation agreements, and started negotiations on Environmental Goods Agreement with 14 members including the US and the European Union, and reached consensus with the US on Information Technology Agreement expansion talks.

3. We have continued to deepen bilateral and regional trade and economic cooperation. We have basically concluded the negotiation of the text of the China-US BIT, and signed the China-Russia Natural Gas Cooperation Agreement, and successfully hosted the sixth ministerial meeting of the China-Arab Cooperation Forum as well as the first ministerial meeting of the China-CELAC Forum.