what is a qualified foreign institutional investor qfii 
the qualified foreign institutional investor qfii is a program that allows specified licensed international investors to participate in mainland china s stock exchanges the qualified foreign institutional investor program was introduced by the people s republic of china in 2002 to provide foreign institutional investors with the right to trade on stock exchanges in shanghai and shenzhen before the launch of the qfii program investors from other nations were not allowed to buy or sell stocks on chinese exchanges due to the country s tight capital controls 1understanding qualified foreign institutional investor qfii with the launch of the qualified foreign institutional investor qfii program in 2002 licensed institutional investors were allowed to purchase and sell yuan denominated a shares which are shares of mainland china based companies however specified quotas constrained foreign access to these shares the chinese government used these quotas to regulate the amount of money that licensed foreign investors could invest in china s capital markets 1the qfii program quota was increased from 30 billion to 80 billion in april 2012 a decade after the program launched the quotas are granted by china s state administration of foreign exchange safe and the quotas can be changed at any time in response to the country s current economic and financial conditions in an effort to attract more foreign investment safe announced it was eliminating quota restrictions in sept 2019 the type of investments that can be traded as part of the qfii system includes listed stocks but excludes foreign oriented shares treasury bonds corporate debentures convertible bonds and other financial instruments as approved by the china securities regulatory commission csrc 2in 2019 nearly 300 overseas institutions had received qfii quotas totaling roughly 111 4 billion 2qualified foreign institutional investor qfii qualifications