China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) emphasizes expanding high-level openness with a focus on the service sector, aiming to unlock new avenues for trade, investment, and innovation.

With foreign investment restrictions in manufacturing largely lifted, the service sector has become the key driver of China's high-level market opening. In 2024, the service industry accounted for roughly 70% of total foreign investment absorbed nationwide, while service trade surpassed $1 trillion for the first time, setting a historic record.

Since 2015, China has launched three batches of comprehensive pilot zones in 11 provinces and cities—including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Hainan, Chongqing, Shenyang, and Nanjing—to test innovative opening policies in technology, finance, culture, telecommunications, and education. These pilots have nurtured new business models and services, such as:

• Financing leasing of large equipment and transport vehicles

• Pledge financing for intellectual property rights

• Credit and settlement mechanisms based on railway bills

• Shared hospitals and cross-border medical insurance for special medicines

• Cross-border elderly care services

In 2024 alone, these 11 pilot regions attracted RMB 293.2 billion in foreign investment, accounting for approximately half of total foreign investment in China's service sector.

This year, the “Action Plan for Accelerating Comprehensive Service Sector Opening Pilot Programs” expanded the initiative to nine additional cities, including Dalian, Ningbo, Xiamen, and Qingdao. The plan targets key service industries, industrial innovation, and cross-border collaboration, encompassing 155 specific pilot tasks.

Illustrative measures include:

• Supporting Chinese gaming companies in overseas expansion

• Allowing foreign doctors to establish clinics

• Facilitating foreign-invested nursing colleges

• Permitting non-profit medical and elderly care institutions funded via donations

• Encouraging international factoring services

• Enabling multinational corporations to conduct RMB-based cross-border treasury operations

• Allowing foreign-invested travel agencies to operate outbound tourism

According to Chen Hongna, Deputy Researcher at the Development Research Center of the State Council, this new round of service sector opening:

• Promotes trade and investment liberalization and facilitation

• Enhances efficient allocation of resources and factors

• Improves the quality and resilience of China's international economic circulation

• Addresses gaps in high-end domestic supply, providing more choices and opportunities for consumers and investors

Chen noted that focusing on service sector openness demonstrates China's unwavering commitment to high-level opening. By relaxing market access, expanding rules-based and institutional opening, and fostering innovation, the plan is expected to further unleash the sector's growth potential and create broader opportunities for international cooperation.