BEIJING - With recent anti-monopoly fines handed to seven firms, China is striving to build up a fair and free market for both foreign and domestic enterprises.

Essilor, Nikon, Zeiss and four other providers of contact lenses were fined more than 19 million yuan ($3.1 million) for price manipulation by China's top economic planner at the end of May.

Local firms can benefit from Windows 8 ban

GSK case sounds alarm for foreign firms

Also last month, the bribery case of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) China, which involves 46 suspects, was handed over to prosecutors in Central China's Hunan province. It was also announced that the use of Windows 8 operating system (OS) in new government computers is forbidden, a move to ensure computer security after the shutdown of Windows XP.

"We have paid great attention to these setbacks which foreign companies have encountered, but our confidence in this market will not be affected," said Yang Qicheng, general manager of MicroConstants China, a preclinical and clinical service provider.

Last year, fines totalling more than 1.4 billion yuan were issued to domestic and foreign firms over anti-trust infringements.

"The moves are just a correction of the past. For the past few decades, China had been adopting preferential policies for foreign firms with a lack of standardized administration for them," said Zhao Zhongxiu, an economics professor at the Beijing-based University of International Business and Economics.

According to Zhao, many foreign companies used to adopt "localized " tactics to carry out their business, including the recruitment of officials' children.