Reaffirming China’s firm support to the national reconciliation and peace process in Somalia, Xi said that China welcomes the Somalis in all fields and at all levels to visit China for exchange. The first China-Africa summit took place in 2006 in Beijing.
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Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Zang Xiangchen said part of China’s efforts to improve on multilateral cooperation with key African countries will now intensify the construction of industrial parks, which have so far helped to create jobs in Ethiopia, Egypt and Zambia.
Mike Danish, a lecturer with International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said China’s establishment of new financing mechanisms such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank was a “clear indication that China wants to assist in the reduction of poverty in Africa”.
While trade relations and development projects were top of the agenda, talks also touched on joint security efforts, with Xi pledging a $60 million grant to support the building and operation of the African Standby Force. “Let’s join hands … and open a new era of China-Africa win-win cooperation and common development”, he added. He said Africa looked forward to continuing to work with China to build peace in Africa.
“Africa tends to remember people that stick with them in the hard times and it’s not been a great year generally speaking for most of Africa because of low commodity prices and the strength of the dollar”, Michael Power, a money manager at Investec Asset Management, said by phone from Cape Town on Friday.
“We underscore not he importance of intensifying cooperation in projects related to beneficiation at source while enhancing technical and intellectual capacities;Enhance collaboration in the development of industrial parks and clusters, technical parks, special economic zones (SEZs) and engineering centres”. China’s imports of African raw materials have dramatically declined since late last year, and Chinese investment in Africa has dropped by 40 per cent in the first half of this year.
Both mutual and multilateral cooperation has entered a new period, Chung said, suggesting that the two sides should better combine China’s development experience and production capacity and Africa’s natural and human resources.
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As China is the world’s largest developing country and Africa is the continent with the biggest number of developing and underdeveloped countries, their cooperation can serve as the most typical and representative example of South-South cooperation.
