On the morning of July 24, the press conference of the 12th China International Fair for Investment & Trade was held in Beijing. Assistant Minister of the Ministry of Commerce Wang Chao, Deputy Governor of Fujian province, and deputy Director as well as Secretary-general of the organizing committee of the Fair Ye Shuangyu and Liu Xigui, Mayor of Xiamen and Deputy Director of the organizing committee of the Fair attended the press conference and introduced the Fair.

Wang Chao expressed over the 30 years of reforming and opening-up, China has gained outstanding achievements in attracting foreign capital and economic cooperation to foreign, for attracting foreign investment, ranking the first for 15 consecutive years among developing countries. As of the first half of 2008, China had accumulatively approved more than 647,000 foreign-invested enterprises with actually utilizing foreign investment of USD815.4b. In the first half of this year, China actually utilized foreign investment of USD52.4b, up by 45.6% year-on-year, showing the features of optimization of industry structure and improvement of regional structure. Advanced manufacturing and modern service industries grew rapidly in attracting foreign capital with central and western China’s areas attracting foreign investment increasing once and 1.4 times respectively. In terms of investment to foreign, as of the end of March of 2008, China’s non-financial industries had accumulatively direct investment of USD113.1b to foreign. In the first quarter of this year, China’s non-financial industries direct investment to foreign stood at USD19.34b, up by 3.5 times year-on-year.