These openings will occur in China’s asset management, insurance, banking, credit rating, and futures industries. Financial liberalization will come in the form of not only expected approval of pending licenses but also acceleration of implementation of structural reforms and relaxation of regulatory requirements that are in line with China’s domestic interests.

Humming along between 6 to 6.5 percent, China’s 2019 gross domestic product (GDP) growth numbers remain a driver of global economic growth. Political priorities are likely to maintain that peppy pace through 2020, but lingering structural challenges, ballooning debt, and uncertainties brought by an increasingly antagonistic bilateral trade conflict will require more proactive Chinese fiscal and monetary policies to prevent excessive economic deceleration.

At the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee meeting, which concluded on December 28, China moved forward with several pieces of legislation that had previously been stalled. The session also set the scene for the next plenary session, or the “Two Sessions,” announcing that it will take place on March 5, and hinted at what could be on the agenda.

While the official “3.0 Shanghai Business Environment Reform” plan does not yet have a set release date, on January 2, the Shanghai municipal government shared the plan’s intended content, and media outlets have since released their own reports on what it might entail. In a recent roundtable with USCBC, Shanghai government officials discussed reforms of a similar nature to those mentioned in the plan’s sneak peek.

This past year finally saw more specific guidance on cybersecurity reviews, critical information infrastructure (CII), cross-border data transfers, and personal information, though many of the policies remain in draft form.

Headlines alleging that a decoupling of the US and Chinese economies is looming, or by some counts, already underway, have appeared in the news cycle for several months now. Once an infrequently used term reserved for economists and electrical engineers, “decoupling” began capturing headlines in the fall of 2018 in an attempt to capture US-China friction in the trade sphere and has held on since.

On Tuesday, November 26, the Department of Commerce announced it is preparing to solicit public comments on proposed rules to implement the May 15 Executive Order 13873, “Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain,” (“the EO”). The long-awaited regulations set out a case-by-case process the secretary of commerce will follow to determine whether a particular transaction meets the EO’s requirements and should be prohibited or mitigated.