Editor's note: Xin Ge, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor at the School of Public Administration and Policy, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Two years ago, on July 18, 2024, the Communist Party of China concluded the third plenary session of its 20th Central Committee with a landmark resolution on deepening reform to advance Chinese modernization, a blueprint for the coming decade. Some of the initial Western commentary predicted a retreat into self-reliance behind the walls of a fortress economy.

Two years on, the evidence points the other way. 

What critics interpreted as an "inward turn" was, in fact, the groundwork for a structural shift: from opening at the border through tariffs and quotas to opening behind the border through rules, regulations, management and standards. Aligning these systems with international practices does more than lower barriers at the border; it reshapes the institutional framework through which global businesses engage with the Chinese market.

Foreign investors long worked their way into China through a thicket of preferential policies and local workarounds. That patchwork is giving way to a predictable and rules-based environment.

The clearest milestone came in late 2024, when the last manufacturing items were struck from the national foreign-investment negative list. Foreign manufacturers now operate on an equal footing across the entire industrial value chain – not as a matter of local discretion but of national rule.

Market access is only the first layer; institutional opening runs deeper into the machinery of regulation. Two recent measures show what this looks like in practice. The revised Administrative Measures for the Adoption of International Standards, in force since June 2025, requires ISO, IEC and ITU standards to be tracked as they evolve and generally caps their conversion into national standards at 12 months. The Negative List for Local Standard Formulation (2025 Edition), a national first issued last October, bars local standards wherever national or industry versions exist and bans them for industrial products outright. Both strike at a long-standing complaint of multinationals: hyper-local standards that act as trade barriers in disguise.

For multinational companies, entering China has often meant navigating dozens of provincial markets rather than a single national market. Local protectionism, tilted procurement and selective enforcement were rarely codified but often encountered.

That is why a unified national market matters to global business. Far from an exercise in state consolidation, it targets local protectionism itself, pursued from the top down.

The scale of this housecleaning is striking. In 2025, fair competition reviewers vetted 58,000 draft policy measures and ordered changes to more than 10,000 that favored local champions or fenced out outside investors. Since early 2025, spot checks of more than half a million existing measures have forced rectification of 13,000 more. A parallel campaign against arbitrary, profit-driven enforcement corrected 57,000 prominent problems in enterprise-related cases and recovered nearly 29 billion yuan ($4.28 billion) for businesses.

The market access negative list is down to 106 items, a thin gate for an economy of this size. When the same rules apply in Heilongjiang as in Guangdong, transaction costs fall. A product approved in Shanghai can be sold in Chengdu without a second round of provincial clearance.

If the unified market supplies the hardware, national treatment supplies the confidence. In June of this year, the Ministry of Commerce and other central departments issued an action plan to stabilize and optimize foreign investment. Its core demand sounds modest but cuts deep: equal treatment for foreign-invested enterprises in government procurement, bidding and state-backed programs such as consumer goods trade-ins, backed by mandatory fair competition review.

The principle is already taking effect. A three-year procurement overhaul running through 2026 has inspected over 30,000 projects, targeting the bias by ownership and registration that once shut foreign suppliers out of public tenders. Pilots for wholly foreign-owned hospitals are expanding to more regions, and several pilot free trade zones now manage cross-border data flows through concise negative lists instead of case-by-case approvals.

In 2025, against geopolitical headwinds and weak global capital flows, 70,392 new foreign-invested enterprises were registered in China, up 19.1% year on year. Foreign direct investment stock stood near $4 trillion at the end of last year after a steady five-year climb. Capital does not pour into a market it believes is closing. These are long-term commitments, not passing trades.

Such an economy cannot be run on ad hoc decrees; it needs law and predictability, precisely what the reforms launched two years ago set out to build. By anchoring its market in transparent, standardized and legally grounded rules, China is offering global business something more durable than cheap labor ever was: institutional certainty.

The record of the past two years is hard to miss: a country doing the slow, unglamorous work of binding itself more tightly to the world economy, rule by rule – and rules outlast the headlines.