An open market

China has been and will continue to be an open market, with a vision to achieve greater mutual benefit and win-win outcomes, the white paper said.

A number of foreign business leaders agreed that China, the world's largest consumer market, offers enormous opportunities to global trading partners.

"We have benefited significantly from China's membership of the WTO, and the country's reform and opening-up has also brought a lot of opportunities for us. China is the second-largest market globally for us," said Yin Zheng, executive vice-president of Schneider Electric.

"We have experienced different development stages of 'sales in China', 'made in China' and 'R&D in China'," he said. "Many of our global executive committee members are based in Hong Kong, enabling us to respond quickly to any changes happening here."

George Xu, CEO of Airbus China, said, looking forward, there is huge growth potential in China's civil aviation market in the next decade.

"In recent years, outbound tourism has grown rapidly, but only about 10 percent of people in China hold passports. If that number grows to 20 or 30 percent, it will be a massive market, and we can foresee that the market will grow robustly," he said.

China is the largest market for Airbus, and the European aircraft manufacturer has seen its highest growth rate in the country. It delivers about one-fourth of its planes to the Chinese market every year.

"Twenty years ago, most multinational companies simply wanted to manufacture in China, but the nature of demand is very different now. They are seeing China as an end market. That means they need to change dramatically," said Bill Winters, group CEO at Standard Chartered.

Helping companies to raise funding to build up local franchises, to manage cross-border working capital flows, and to go through China's interbank bond market, are all areas in which Standard Chartered would like to play a larger role when it comes to supporting companies' needs, Winters said.