China may ask firms to invest

Press, 17 February 1984, Page 4

China may ask firms to invest

NZPA staff correspondent Peking

A Chinese Trade Minister who met the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Lange, put emphasis on China’s attracting investment not just in joint ventures but in independent sole enterprises, said Mr Lange in Peking yesterday. The deputy Minister of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, Mr Jia Shi, had reiterated his convictions about the need for foreign investment and foreign technology, said Mr Lange.

Mr Jia. had been insistent that that was an irreversible philosophy and that there would be new deals on taxation between the countries, Lange said.

However the emphasis which the Deputy Minister had put on what he described as sole-enterprise investment had been the significant aspect of the meeting.

“(There was) an invitation to foreign investors to actually establish their own units without participation by Chinese partners,” said Mr Lange. “But I was told they accepted the principle of the protection of intellectual property such as patents and copyright and were devising forms of agreement which would assure overseas investors,” he said.

Mr Lange said that he had some reservations because it seemed as though some joint ventures had

been difficult even given the willing co-operation of the local partner. Without a local partner there could be even more problems, said Mr Lange.

The Government was developing something the Deputy Minister had called an investors’ protection agreement, to provide a measure of protection to companies which so invested, said Mr Lange. “I was here three years ago and I talked about the difficulties of developing a body of commercial law,” he said.

Mr Lange said he was told yesterday that substantial progress had been made. The Deputy Minister said tgat there were still problems, said Mr Lange.

New Zealand was assured of continuing to be a longterm supplier of timber products to China, Mr Lange said.

After a meeting with China’s Vice-Minister for Forestry, Liu Kun, Mr Lange said Mr Liu had been “quite specific” on this. Mr Lange -said that he had been told, in the course of an exposition on the state of China’s forestry development, that the Government planned to boost the country’s afforested area from 12 per cent to 20 per cent by the year 2000. “That means they need to plant four million hectares a year to reach their target of 64 million hectares, of new forest by the end of the century,” said Mr Lange.

Even that would nowhere near meet China’s needs, he said.

China at present consumed 50 million cubic metres of timber a year and wanted to at least double this, he said.

“I see scope for co-opera-tion between New Zealand and China in the areas of disease and pest control, tree type yield and so forth,” said Mr Lange.

New Zealand supplies about 70,000 tonnes annually to China, mostly of pulp but also newsprint, paper board, and sack-craft, and consistently holds about 15 to 20 per cent of the market, a trade official said.