On 24 April 2025, Chinese Ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang attended the Tianjin Investment Environment Promotion Conference in London. In his keynote speech, Ambassador Zheng provided an overview of the current state of China’s economic development. He said that China’s economy got off to a stable and good start in the first quarter of this year, with GDP growing by 5.4% year on year. Retail sales of consumer goods grew by 4.6%. Fixed asset investment rose by 4.2%. Industrial value added of enterprises grew by 6.5% and those for the service sector went up 5.3%. China’s total trade in goods reached 10.3 trillion yuan, with exports up by 6.9%. All of this shows that the series of measures we have been taking, including expanding domestic demand, stabilising foreign trade and foreign investment, accelerating the development of new quality productive forces, and expanding high-standard opening up, have been working quite well. China’s economy has strong resilience and internal driving force.

Ambassador Zheng emphasised that while pursuing its own development, China will also share opportunities with the world through opening up. China’s overall tariff level has been reduced to 7.3%. Today, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly released the market access negative list 2025, cutting the list from 117 items in 2022 to 106 and widening market access still further. China will continue to provide better services and protection for foreign businesses.

China has a predictable and consistent macro policy environment, a supersize market of over 1.4 billion people, the most complete industrial system in the world, and an increasingly internationalised, market-oriented and law-based business environment. Companies from around the world, including the UK, are welcome to join in China’s development and achieve mutual benefit. Now is the best time to invest in China.