Foreign direct investment (FDI) in China is the most dramatic manifestation of China's open-door policy. Together with continuous import and export expansion, FDI has increasingly exposed the Chinese economy to the western world during the past decade. There are, however, several differences between FDI and foreign trade in terms of their implications for the domestic economy. The most obvious is that FDI directly helps to relieve domestic capital supply bottlenecks and to promote employment and economic growth. By contrast, increased capital formation through imports of machinery and equipment must be financed by extra export earnings.

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Economic integration is essentially a process of unification – the means whereby coherence is imposed upon previously separate, even disparate, geographical regions. It may be pursued as a domestic or international goal, although the simultaneous attainment of both may prove elusive. Recent efforts towards the creation of formal trans-national, regional economic identities, whether North American (NAFTA), European (EC) or Asian-Pacific (APEC), have sometimes been perceived as a threat to the establishment of a truly integrated global economy. By contrast, the remarkable degree of economic integration already achieved between southern China and Hong Kong (and, latterly, Taiwan) might ironically have a fissiparous effect on China's domestic economy. From this point of view, there is a danger that increasing economic integration within Greater China could threaten China's national economic identity, or at least compel its re-definition.

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One of the most dramatic changes in rural China in the post-Mao era has been the abrupt increases in peasant incomes and consumption since 1978. These were deliberately brought about by an overall reorientation in economic policy which aimed at improving peasant incentives, so as to boost farm output and ease the agricultural supply constraint on industrialization – the government's long-run goal. The new development strategy has already resulted in a considerable modification of the Soviet-style agriculture-industry dichotomy, in favour of the Chinese peasants.