China’s top economic planning agency wants to clear something up: it never told tech companies to turn away foreign money. The National Development and Reform Commission made that statement on May 22, responding to reports that had rattled international investors for nearly a month.
NDRC spokesperson Li Chao said foreign investment remains welcome in China’s technology sector, provided it complies with Chinese laws and doesn’t threaten national security. That last caveat, of course, is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
What prompted the clarification
The NDRC’s statement was a direct response to a Bloomberg report from April 24 that alleged Chinese regulators had informally instructed domestic tech firms to refuse US funding without first obtaining government approval. The report named specific companies, including AI startups Moonshot AI and StepFun, as well as ByteDance.
That kind of informal guidance, sometimes called “window guidance” in Chinese regulatory circles, is notoriously difficult to confirm or deny. It operates in the gray zone between official policy and bureaucratic suggestion. Think of it as the regulatory equivalent of “nice funding round you’ve got there, shame if something happened to it.”
