1st LD Writethru: Chinese president reassures U.S. business leaders on economy

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday reassured U.S. business leaders on the positive prospect of the Chinese economy and called for boosting Sino-American win-win cooperation in trade.

"The trend of China's economy toward growth and expansion has not changed," Xi said at a China-U.S. CEO roundtable in Seattle on the second day of his weeklong visit to the United States.

"China's economic fundamentals remain solid and will continue to maintain a long-term steady growth at a medium-to-high speed," he told more than 30 business leaders from the two countries' top-notch enterprises, including Alibaba, Lenovo, IBM and Microsoft.

The president expounded on Beijing's efforts to shore up the economy, stressing that China will upgrade the industrial structure, promote innovation-driven development, accelerate agricultural modernization, follow a low-carbon development path, streamline administration and delegate more powers to lower levels.

"The Chinese economy still has huge potentials, ample leeway and strong intrinsic tenacity, and thus is fully capable of providing a broad market and solid support for the world economy," Xi said.

Noting there are new opportunities facing China and the United States, the president called for deepening bilateral trade cooperation for the benefit of the two countries' development and the world's prosperity.

"We support large American businesses in setting up regional headquarters or research and development centers in China, and encourage more small- and medium-sized companies to expand businesses in China. Meanwhile, China will keep increasing its investment in the United States," he said.

The president stressed that China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation is mutually beneficial in nature.

The American businesses that operate in China and cooperate with Chinese counterparts have played a positive role in China's development and, by harvesting generous profits at the same time, helped boost the American economy, Xi said.

"Chinese companies' investment in the United States has also been on the rise in recent years, creating a great number of job opportunities in the country," he said.

China, said the president, will do more in opening-up, greatly reduce foreign investment access restrictions and enhance intellectual property rights protection.

"China and the United States are advancing the talks on a bilateral investment treaty ... which conforms to China's general direction of deepening reform and further opening-up to the outside world, and also benefits the American economy," he added. Endi