China will clear the way for foreign investors' capital to flow in and out of the country more easily by waiving and simplifying regulations, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, or SAFE, said on Wednesday.
In a statement published on its website, SAFE said that there's no evidence to suggest that the nation is seeing pressure from capital inflows, although the yuan has strengthened in recent weeks, mainly driven by increasing optimism about China's economic outlook.
According to a survey conducted by the Chinese Entrepreneur Survey System, Chinese business people's top concerns are a lack of overseas demand, excess capacity, and financing difficulties faced by small and medium-sized enterprises.
However, they remain cautiously optimistic about next year, expecting a rebound in new orders, reduced costs, improved earnings, a moderate rise in exports, and increased employment and investment..
As China is striving to boost domestic demand to save the economy from recession, Lanzhou New Zone, a newly approved State-level economic development area in Northwest China's Gansu province, is being constructed to become what local investors say will be "a golden opportunity that no one wants to miss".
Previous approvals include the Pudong New Zone in Shanghai and Binhai New Zone in Tianjin. Both got the nod from central government in the 1990s.
China's import scale expanded 22 percent as an annual average during the last decade, Vice Minister of Commerce Zhong Shan said at the China Import Forum 2012 on Friday, adding that there is great potential for further growth ahead.
From 2002 to 2011, China's annual import value jumped from $295.3 billion to $1.7 trillion, taking up to 9.5 percent of the world's total imports value, a sharp increase from the 4.4 percent recorded in 2002, according to Zhong.
The dominance of the "Big Four" banks is unshakable in most parts of China - but in Guizhou, a largely underdeveloped province, they are still far behind a local market leader in inspiring loyalty.
Even combined, the deposits of the Big Four - Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd, China Construction Bank Corp, Agricultural Bank of China Ltd and Bank of China Ltd - are not much bigger than those of Guizhou Rural Credit Union, a credit cooperative which alone owns 21 percent of the province's total deposits of 1 trillion yuan so far this year.
An index, started to track offshore yuan business, has shown that the currency's international use has grown more than seven-fold over the past two years.
Twenty percent of the Chinese population will be wealthy enough to be considered "affluent" by 2020, according to research by the management-consulting company Boston Consulting Group.
By then, 280 million people are expected to form the country's affluent class, wielding $3.1 trillion a year of purchasing power, an amount equal to 5 percent of global consumption, the company said.
It defined people who have an annual household disposable income of $20,000 to $1 million as affluent.
Innovation in existing crossbreeding and cultivation technologies remains the future direction for China's agriculture, said Han Guiqing, president of the Heilongjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Green progress, which President Hu Jintao emphasized in his report to the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, has remained one of the hot topics among delegates in the past few days.
In the report, Hu drew an unprecedented parallel between ecological progress and economic as well as political development.
Chen Min'er, deputy Party secretary of Guizhou, said the province sees green progress as a way to catch up with more developed areas in the east.
Chang Wenyu thought he would be unemployed when the quarry he worked for in a small city in East China was ordered to close out of environmental concerns.
The number of foreign companies using the yuan as their currency of choice has surged after rules introduced earlier this year allowed yuan settlements for Chinese traders.
The number of French companies paying in yuan increased by 30 percent in the second quarter from the previous quarter.
Australian companies closely followed that example with a rise of 25 percent in the same period, according to Western Union, a global payment company.
Hainan province is expected to expand the network of duty-free shops across the island in a bid to build itself into a global shopping center and tourism destination.
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