Foreign investor concerns remain as to how national security or international laws would apply, or what constitutes a new project. What is clear is that China will continue to ring-fence its sensitive industries through the negative list.
Beijing and Washington are misdiagnosing each other’s complaints as economic in nature rather than political, and China’s new ‘negative list’ of restricted sectors is a continuation of this trend.
Washington needs to temper its unrealistic hopes that China can overhaul its legal system overnight, while Beijing must stop seeing all US legal action as top-down directives from Trump.