China's Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) flows reached 183 billion USD in 2016 (UNCTAD, 2017), causing China to become the second largest source of OFDI. China's OFDI has been growing quickly in recent years, boosted by policies such as the Open Door policy, the Go Global policy and the One Belt One Road policy. The literature on the determinants of OFDI is extensive, however, only a small part of it has examined the role of policies using quantitative methodologies. We believe that in the case of China the role of the central government, and thereby of its policies, are likely to have had some - if not great - effects on Chinese OFDI. Besides, throughout China's economic reform in the past 40 years, policies have always been important tools to steer the domestic economy. To capture the effects of policies, we created policies indices for China's OFDI at the national level. By adopting an econometric methodology with national level and provincial level secondary data, we found that regulatory policies, service policies and the attitude of government did have significant effects on China's OFDI. In addition, policies and the development of the economy had joint effects on China's OFDI. To our knowledge, this is the first time that China's government policies toward OFDI are examined in a quantitative analysis.