There is still tremendous scope for growth. In the onshore stockmarket foreigners hold nearly 5% of Chinese shares; by comparison, foreigners own about 25% of American shares. Foreigners own just 3% of Chinese bonds, versus about 30% of the American market, and are overwhelmingly concentrated in government bonds. Corporate debt is still seen as too murky.
这里面仍有巨大的增长空间。在大陆股市，外资持股近5%，相比之下美股的外资持股比例约为25%。外资持债约占美国债市的30%，而在中国仅为3%，而且绝大多数是政府债券。公司债仍被视为一池浑水。
One obvious concern for foreign investors is whether they can get their money into and, crucially, out of, China. Doing so is now easier. Hong Kong's stock-connect programme, which allows trading in Chinese stocks, has fuelled a 40-fold increase in daily cross-border trading volumes in China since 2015. Repatriating profits through a qualified institutional-investor scheme used to take up to six months. Now it takes a few days. The realtest will come if markets crash, as they did in 2015. Then, the government made it hard for foreigners to take funds out of the country.
外国投资者明显担忧的一个问题是他们的资金能否自由进入和撤出中国大陆，后者尤为关键。这在现在变容易了。沪港通和深港通机制让境外资金可以交易大陆股票，自2015年推出以来已令中国股市每日的跨境交易量增长了40倍。通过合资格的机构投资者机制，现在只要几天就可以把收益取回，而过去要长达六个月。真正的考验将在市场崩溃时出现，就像2015年那样。当时政府设置的障碍让外国人很难把资金撤出中国。
The second dimension of China's opening is to foreign institutions. Investment banks long touted China's potential yet were granted only glacial increases in their onshore presence. Things are speeding up, thanks in no small partto the deterioration in relations between America and China. Wall Street banks, the thinking in Beijing goes, are powerful lobbyists in Washington. Goldman Sachs, which set up its joint venture in China in 2004, is applying to take over 100% of its onshore investment bank. A number of other foreign banks, including Morgan Stanley and UBS, are expanding their domestic businesses.
中国对外开放的第二个层面是向外资金融机构开放。投资银行早就在大谈中国市场的潜力，但它们的在华业务却仅获准以龟速增长。现在开始提速了，这在很大程度上得益于中美关系的恶化。北京的想法是，华尔街投行在华盛顿有很强的游说能力。2004年在中国设立合资公司的高盛正在申请收购其大陆合资公司100%的股权。摩根士丹利和瑞银等一批外资银行也在拓展中国大陆业务。
The optimistic case is that these investments will, in time, pay dividends. The oft-repeated line from foreign financiers is that China is a long-term, strategic project. When smic, a semiconductor group, listed in Shanghai in July, it raised $6.6bn, the largest offering in China since 2010. "That really got people wanting to do more work on initial public offerings (ipos) and look beyond just secondary trading," says Christina Ma, head of greater China equities at Goldman Sachs. To be a full-service investment bank, a patchwork of licences is needed: for wealth management, underwriting and trading, to name a few. Some firms are putting them together. The disadvantages of being a foreign operator in the Chinese market are disappearing, says Eugene Qian, the chairman of UBS Securities.
情况乐观的话，这些投资将在日后带来红利。外国金融家总说中国是一个长期战略项目。半导体集团中芯国际去年7月在上海上市，融资66亿美元，是自2010年以来中国最大规模的IPO。“这确实令人们想在IPO上多下功夫，而不只是盯着二级交易。”高盛大中华区股票部主管马智萍说。在大陆开设全业务投资银行需要申请各种牌照，理财、承销和交易牌照只是其中几个。一些公司正把它们一一拿到手。外资机构在中国市场上的劣势正在消失，瑞银证券的董事长钱于军表示。
