On April 5, 2024, in an exclusive interview with Senior Foreign Policy Writer Tom O'Connor from Newsweek, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng pointed out that as China strives to expand domestic demand in recent years, new quality productive forces will serve as a catalyst that further brings out the vitality and potential of China's supersized market. The upgrading of traditional industries and the boom of new ones will further energize China's growth, and generate huge investment and consumption needs. The advancement of information technologies, including network technology, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, will create more consumption scenarios. Greener, more digitized ways of life and production will also catalyze diverse, higher-end consumption demands.

Ambassador Xie said that as China encourages equipment upgrades in industry, agriculture, construction, transport, education, culture, tourism and health care, a market with an annual scale of over 5 trillion yuan ($691 billion) could emerge. The trade-in of durable consumer goods such as automobiles, home appliances and furniture could open up a trillion-yuan market. As we shift from controlling energy consumption and intensity toward limiting carbon emissions and intensity, an annual investment of over 2 trillion yuan is needed before 2030. Also, China's low-altitude economy is expanding quickly, which is expected to hit 2 trillion yuan by 2030. 

In the first two months of this year, China's retail sales grew 5.5 percent year-over-year, total imports and exports of goods expanded 8.7 percent, and power generation of major electricity production enterprises went up 8.3 percent. Some 7,160 foreign-invested firms were established across China, up by 35 percent from 2023, the biggest surge in five years. In March, China's manufacturing PMI rose above 50 for the first time since last September, bouncing back to expansion territory.

Ambassador Xie noted that while China has a 400-million-strong middle-income group, its per capita GDP has only recently exceeded $12,000. With private consumption accounting for merely 40 percent of GDP, much remains to be done to upgrade the consumption structure. Even so, though, China has been contributing 30 percent of global growth for years. Just imagine how much more potential will be unlocked as China's high-quality development benefits all the 1.4 billion people, and the population in the middle-income bracket reaches 800 million, and as consumption soars in education, tourism, healthcare, social pension insurance, government-subsidized housing and more! With its immense size and vast prospects, China, as a premier destination for global investment that remains undervalued, is simply unparalleled. Don't forget: the return on foreign direct investment in China stands at around 9 percent in the past five years.