Shyam Kamath's recent study of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China aims collate recently available (p. 108), in order to draw for in other centrally planned economies (p. 109) and for the future of China's economic development (p. 110).1 The article's conclusions are described as tentative, and they are rather negative: the Chinese FDI policy is unlikely to bear much fruit (p. 123). In this comment I argue that stronger lessons can be drawn from China's experience with FDI, and that this experience has been a positive one. The major criticism of Kamath's article concerns its failure to view the Open Door policy in a more dynamic light. Kamath mentions considerable changes (p. 108), but presents data mainly on 1979-83 (and never beyond 1985) and treats this as the single period of the Open Door policy. Looking at the evolution of Chinese policy undermines or even reverses many of Kamath's conclusions. Table 1 and figure 1 illustrate the growth of pledged and actual in China since 1979. The 1979-83 period was one of slow growth in FDI, the first stage in opening up an economy that had been autarkic for decades. Statements like rights do not exist (p. 108) capture the feelings of many foreign investors dealing with China in these years. They were, however, an exaggeration, and, more important, Chinese authorities came to recognize the advantages of codifying property rights. This they started to do in a series of regulations put together in 1983-84, which provided the background for a boom in pledged in 1984 and the first half of 1985. The boom ended as the Chinese authorities became worried at their loss of macroeconomic control, and as foreign investors found that while the situation had improved, it was still not easy to do business in China. The biggest single obstacle still facing foreign investors was the inconvertible cur-