The emphasis on the market's more decisive role in allocating resources in the Communique issued by the Third Plenum Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee reveals a more open attitude by China in facing the world after 35 years of reform and opening up.

The reform blueprint heralding a more open and fair market economic system has offered foreign firms fresh investment space.

Giving full play to market forces

Davide Cucino, President of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, said: "The blueprint does provide a malleable framework that acknowledges a fundamental need for government control to be ceded to market forces and so could still lead to meaningful changes during practical implementation."

Cucino believes there is a need for urgent structural changes and bold, truly comprehensive reforms, including those related to the financial system, as well as steps to bring SOEs into equal competition with private players. "Crossing the river by feeling for stepping stones is necessary, but the river is already starting to swell and firm ground on the opposite bank needs to be reached soon," he added.

China is currently the largest trade partner of ASEAN, the second largest trade partner of the United States and the European Union, and a key trade and investment market for other major economies. With the heightened stress on an open market and deepening reform of the system, it is hoped that foreign investment can play a bigger role in China's push for economic upgrading.

Boosting a "Diamond Decade" of China-ASEAN relations

Xu Ningning, Deputy Secretary-general of the China-ASEAN Business Council, said that as the Communique vows to relax market investment access thresholds, facilitate the development of free trade zones (FTZ) and further open inland markets in a bid to build a unified, fair and open market, it will usher in a "diamond decade" for Sino-ASEAN cooperation and promote an upgraded version of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area. The two sides decided in October to scale up two-way trade to one trillion U.S. dollars by 2020, more than double last year's trade volume, and newly increased two-way investment to 150 billion U.S. dollars in the next eight years.

Since its reform and opening up, China has been committed to building a more open market system. In the months leading up to the third plenum, China has taken steps toward a more open market, including liberalizing lending rates of financial institutions, allowing greater private investment into sectors previously dominated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), cutting 221 administrative approval procedures, and particularly setting up the trailblazing Shanghai FTZ piloting of modes of "Negative List" and "Post-Establishment National Treatment." China also committed to continually inject reforming vitality into pilot reform districts including Qianhai area in Shenzhen, Binhai new area in Tianjin, Liangjiang area in Chongqing, Zhoushan district in Zhejiang Province, Lanzhou city in Gansu Province and Nansha district in Guangzhou and so on, exploring the new round of reform and opening up of China.

China can build an open market

According to a recent survey by the German Chamber of Commerce in China, as the largest economy in the EU, Germany has about 4,500 companies doing business in China. And most of them have confidence in the odds of China's investment environment improving, planning to invest more next year.

However, there is still a long way to go before China achieves an open market as existing interest groups retain enough influence to inhibit foreign firms from flexing their muscles in the world's number-two economy, said Greg Gilligan, Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce China.

Gilligan added that opaque investment approval procedures, and a lack of effective administrative and legal recourse when investments are denied, pose huge barriers to potential benefactors of the Chinese economy.

But Alexandra Voss, executive chair of the chamber in north China, claimed that the Chinese Government is aware of the current barriers and acknowledges them. Voss said: "China has the potential to foster an open and unified market through means such as simplification of investment access and regulation of energy and water prices via market forces."

Concerning the speed of China's reform, Joerg Mull, Chairman of the German Chamber of Commerce in China and Executive Vice President of Volkswagen (China) Investment Co., Ltd, said reform is a gradually varied process. "We have to be realistic about the speed of change. It is not like switching a light on and off. It will be evolution and you have to take a gradual approach to fine tuning," said Mull.