India must learn from other emerging countries: Wang Jinzhen

In a Q&A with Business Standard, vice-chairman of China Chamber of International Commerce says India needs to simplify FDI norms

Wang Jinzhen, vice chairman, China Chamber of International Commerce (CCOIC) and chief representative of Bureau of International Exhibition (BIE) said India needs to simplify the foreign investment norms. In an interview with Nayanima Basu, he said China is taking steps to import more from India. Excerpts:

India is concerned over a persistent trade deficit with China. What is China doing to import more from India?
Post the financial crisis, growth rates in both countries have been falling. To correct this situation China is also doing a lot of things to increase imports from India such as we organized a China International Imports Fair to help companies of other countries to increase their exports to China and that included a lot of Indian companies. The CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) took a huge delegation there recently to exhibit exportable products. Apart from this, various provinces in China are now looking for more and more imports. But as far as India is concerned, I think you need to diversify your export basket. You need to increase export of iron ore to China because your domestic arrangement has decreased and that has impacted India’s export to China. The Indian IT sector is doing very well in China such as Infosys, TCS. They all have offices there and are doing extremely well. But of course you need to do more.

What is the view of Chinese industry in doing business here?

India needs to learn from other emerging countries and simplify rules for foreign investment. The process here is too long and you need thousands of regulators’ stamps before an investment proposal can go through. This is not conducive at all.

India is also planning to increase its IT exports and pharmaceuticals to China in order to address the trade deficit problem?
We are open for that. We both are members of WTO. China is one of the largest agricultural products importing countries like Soyabean. We import almost 50-60 million tonnes of Soybean each year from other countries. So I think we should welcome Indian agricultural exports. As far as pharmaceutical exports are concerned, we need more from India.

The government has recently said that the proposed RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) will be a better forum to address the trade deficit problem with China, instead of a separate bilateral trading arrangement, talks for which are still at initial stages.
Both are supplementary to each other. Well I think before RCEP we can go for a bilateral trade deal because when issues are between two countries then talks become much simpler and easier than the multilateral ones.

Chinese PM Li Keqiang during his to India in May spoke of a liberal business visa regime. Is China taking necessary steps towards that and how soon is that expected?

Visa procedures needs to be more simplified to do more business. China is open for that. This is proved by the amount of FDI we receive. So relaxed business visa is important.

India has announced a National Manufacturing Policy and the government is inviting companies to invest in the proposed manufacturing zones. How interested Chinese companies are in this?
China is the biggest manufacturing country in the world even though technologies are still improving but we are the biggest. We are still waiting to see how the manufacturing policy shapes up here.