Email:xiamen@lehmanlaw.com
Xiamen was one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened by the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) at the end of the First Opium War between Britain and China and has long been an important commercial center for foreign business people and overseas Chinese trading and investing in China. More recently, Xiamen was designated as one of China's Special Economic Zones in 1980, making it one of China’s earliest Special Economic Zones.
Since the establishment of the Xiamen Special Economic Zone, Xiamen has opened up to foreign direct investment and created many jobs, factories, export opportunities for local companies and multinational corporations. Xiamen benefits particularly from investment capital from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. By the end of 2000, a total of 4,991 projects with foreign direct investment had been approved in the city, with a contractual foreign investment amount of US$17.527 billion and an actual foreign investment amount of US$11.452 billion. Xiamen is also the host of the China International Fair for Investment and Trade held annually in early September to attract foreign direct investment into the Chinese mainland.
Xiamen's primary economic activities include fishing, shipbuilding, food processing, tanning, textiles, machine tool manufacturing, chemical industries, telecommunications, and financial services.
Xiamen Port is also one of the top ten ports in China. Located on Xiamen Island at the mouth of the Jiulong River, the port is a huge, deepwater, ice-free port that does not suffer from silt problems. An excellent natural harbor that is well connected to the mainland, there are 81 berths of large, medium and small tonnage, including 16 deep-water berths, of which 6 operate containers of over 10,000 tonnes. 100,000 t ships can berth straight at the inner port, while 50 000 t ships can pull in for loading and unloading. Currently, Xiamen port has navigation routes to Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Kaohsiung and Singapore. Also, Xiamen has recently opened ocean routes to the Mediterranean Sea, Europe and the Americas.
LEHMAN, LEE & XU’s Xiamen partner office provides our clients with a wide variety of legal services including advisory services concerning foreign direct investment, commercial law, intellectual property matters, and litigation. Please contact: xiamen@lehmanlaw.com for more information.
