Editor's Note: The writer is a freelance columnist on international affairs based in Karachi, Pakistan. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of China Economic Net.

The most telling figure from Thursday’s State Council Information Office briefing on trade and investment was 93.99 billion yuan, the profits foreign companies earned in China in the first nine months of this year and chose to put back into the country instead of sending home. That reinvestment rose 4.7 percent year on year, and the new projects it funds are landing in artificial intelligence and biomedicine.

The pattern held all year. In the first half alone, almost 4,800 foreign-funded firms expanded their existing investments, and more than 47,000 new foreign-invested enterprises registered between January and September. The money is going where China’s new growth is. From January to August, high-tech FDI rose 35.1 percent to 200.26 billion yuan and now makes up 41.7 percent of all foreign investment, 12.4 points higher than a year earlier. Investment in R&D and design services jumped 74 percent. Over the same months, French investment grew 39.2 percent, Swiss 16.7 percent and Korean 16.5 percent. Multinationals are no longer coming only to assemble. They are coming to invent.

The free trade zones show where this is heading. China’s 23 pilot zones, the newest approved for Inner Mongolia in April, handled 8 trillion yuan of imports and exports from January to August, up 36.7 percent, roughly double the national pace. Actual foreign investment in them reached 128.74 billion yuan, up 19.3 percent. Against national customs totals, the zones carried close to a quarter of China’s trade in those eight months.

Hainan is the clearest case. Island-wide special customs operations have put 6,600 product categories, 74 percent of taxable items, on the zero-tariff list. Through May, Hainan’s goods trade reached 173.98 billion yuan, up 54.6 percent, and zero-tariff imports grew 120 percent. In Haikou, a semiconductor maker exported 773,000 transistors made on duty-free imported equipment. The zones are not exceptions to national policy. They are its rehearsal.

The 15th Five-Year Plan now asks trade to stand on three pillars: goods, services and digital. Each already has 2026 evidence underneath it.

First, goods are moving up the value chain. Trade in industrial robots, electronic components, computer parts and electrical equipment passed 10 trillion yuan in the first three quarters, up 58.9 percent, and Chinese own-brand exports grew 26.7 percent. The world is buying Chinese engineering, not just Chinese assembly.

Second, services are finding customers who walk in the door. The “China Haul” videos on foreign social media have a ledger behind them: sales eligible for departure tax refunds rose about 60 percent from January to August, and the number of travelers claiming refunds tripled. The refund policy’s 2.0 version brought paperless processing from July and the right to collect an instant refund at any departure port within 28 days. In the third quarter, visa-free foreign arrivals reached 8.99 million, up 24.1 percent. In the first half, travel service exports rose 31.1 percent. A visitor who flies home with a Shenzhen drone in her luggage is an export that never touched a container ship.

Third, digital trade is already earning abroad. In the first seven months, services exports rose 17.1 percent, and knowledge-intensive services made up more than half. At September’s services fair in Beijing, Alibaba reported that more than 10 million small and medium-sized businesses worldwide run on its AI agent platform. China is exporting the tools other economies use to trade.