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China doubled the quota of its Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor program to $300 billion, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange said in a statement on Monday.

The move comes amid efforts to open up the country’s financial system, and encourage overseas participation in a market that last year saw record corporate defaults and the world’s worst performance by a major global stock market.

SAFE said in the statement that the doubling was “to meet the needs of foreign investors to expand investment in China’s capital market.”

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Lucille Liu in Beijing at xliu621@bloomberg.net;Jun Luo in Shanghai at jluo6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sam Mamudi at smamudi@bloomberg.net, Jeanette Rodrigues

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