Editor's note: The Two Sessions, a major event on the Chinese political calendar, is underway. We've invited experts from various fields to write articles about hot issues that help us better understand today's China. This is the seventh piece of our "China's Road to Development" series. John Gong is a professor at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing and research fellow at the Academy of China Open Economy Studies at UIBE. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

Ever since Donald Trump started his trade war against China, a decoupling strategy of some sort in various areas has been part of the mainstay strategy throughout his administration. Joe Biden's administration inherited, if not expanded and intensified, much of the Trump policies with respect to China. But what both administrations have got so far is the exact opposite of what their policies were designed to achieve.

About trade, other than imposing an extra burden on American households of a few hundred bucks a year via their tariffs, Washington's trade policy achieved nothing - trade deficit with China actually increased significantly. On foreign direct investment (FDI), the picture for the last two years is even more favorable to China.

2021 was a bad year as we all know, but China's official FDI figures for the last year, according to the country's Commerce Ministry, stands at $173.5 billion, representing an impressive 20.2 percent increase over the previous year. To make some politicians in Washington even more mind-boggling, the statistics from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development indicate that FDI in China last year is even larger, at $179 billion, which is 11 percent of the total global FDI amount.

According to the Commerce Ministry, the main reasons why FDI has continuously seen robust growth is the current administration's relentless drive to keep opening up by means of establishing free trade zones, conducting free trade port programs in south China's Hainan Province, and a host of other pilot programs in many other cities. It is clear that despite all the claims of rising labor costs and other increasing costs of doing business in China, the world's largest consumer market remains to be an attractive place to make investment.

Nevertheless, it is still an intriguing question to ask where all this investment money came from. A press release from the Commerce Ministry in last November mentioned that the increase in China's FDI came from countries engaged in the Belt and Road initiative. But these are mostly developing countries that wouldn't generate a large amount of outflowing capital to China, so the workhorse of FDI in China might be the Western multinational companies operating in China, because they have been doing exceptionally well in the last few years, even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a survey from the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, 60 percent of sampled European companies plan to increase investment in the country. American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai   reported the same thing – 60 percent of the surveyed U.S. companies increased investment in the last year.

In fact, for some American companies, the business in China is becoming even more important than their home markets. Today, General Motors Company sells more cars in China than in the U.S. Of Tesla's almost a million vehicles delivered worldwide last year, half of them came from its factory in Shanghai. Apple's sales revenue is even more lopsided in that regard, with $300 billion sales revenue in China versus $175 billion in the U.S.

These corporate behemoths are the real anchoring forces driving China's comfortable FDI figures last year and in the years to come. With the war in Europe and the robust economic growth in China, multinational companies will continue to find that China is still much an attractive place to do business, let alone a very safe place.

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