China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Commerce on Sunday jointly released a revised catalogue of industries that encourage foreign investment.

The catalogue includes an industry catalogue for encouraging foreign investment nationwide and a catalogue of advantageous industries for foreign investment in the country's central, western and northeastern regions.

It is expected to give better play to the positive role of foreign investment in China's industrial development, technological progress and structural optimization, said an official with the NDRC.

The number of listed sectors where foreign investment is encouraged see marked rise. Compared with the 2017 version, the new catalogue for encouraging foreign investment nationwide has 67 newly-added items and 45 modified items, while the catalogue of advantageous industries in central, western and northeastern regions has introduced 54 new items.

Over 80 percent of the newly-added or revised items of the nationwide catalogue point to the manufacturing industry. Foreign investment is more encouraged in sectors such as high-end manufacturing, intelligent manufacturing, and green manufacturing.

New items have been added to encourage foreign investment in 5G core components, etching machines for integrated circuits, chip packaging equipment, and cloud computing equipment.

Besides, new entries have been added for artificial intelligence, clean production, carbon capture and circular economy.

The catalogue for the central and western regions further adds labor-intensive as well as advanced and applicable technology industries and supporting facilities, giving the regions greater support to their embracing of industrial transfer of foreign-funded businesses.

China attracted a record high foreign direct investment (FDI) of 138.3 billion U.S. dollars last year, bucking a global trend of FDI slide. In the first five months of this year, the country saw an FDI inflow of 54.6 billion dollars, up 3.7 percent year on year.