China's State Council announced Wednesday a regulation to standardize and encourage the establishment of joint venture enterprises by overseas investors. The regulation, which will take effect from March next year, covers both enterprises and individual investors and defines those joint venture enterprises as those set up by more than two overseas investors or by an overseas investor and a Chinese investor. The regulation aims to encourage overseas investors with advanced technology and management experience to set up joint ventures in an effort to promote the development of industries such as the modern servicing sector. It also applies to investors from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), Macao SAR and Taiwan. But it is not fully applied to investment-oriented partnership, according to the State Council. 'As for venture capital enterprises and private equity funds, we still lack necessary knowledge on whether they bear big risks, what the risks are and whether stricter regulations should be adopted, and there are different understandings on this issue among relevant parties,' said an official with the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council. The amount of foreign direct investment into China rose for the third consecutive month in October, up 5.7 percent year on year to 7.1 billion U.S. dollars, according to statistics from the Ministry of Commerce. 