Xi announces 10 major China-Africa cooperation plans for coming 3 years

Chinese President Xi Jinping announced here Friday that his country will roll out 10 major plans to boost cooperation with Africa in the coming three years. Proposing to lift the China-Africa relationship to a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership in a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the second summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Xi said the programs are aimed at carrying out the upgrade. The big package covers the areas of industrialization, agricultural modernization, infrastructure, financial services, green development, trade and investment facilitation, poverty reduction and public welfare, public health, people-to-people exchanges, and peace and security. The programs, stressed the president, will focus on helping African countries break the three development bottlenecks of backward infrastructure, talent shortage and inadequate fund, accelerate industrialization and agricultural modernization, and realize independent and sustainable development. To ensure smooth implementation of the initiatives, Xi announced, China will offer 60 billion US dollars of funding support, including 5 billion dollars of free aid and interest-free loans, 35 billion dollars of preferential loans and export credit on more favorable terms, 5 billion dollars of additional capital for the China-Africa Development Fund and the Special Loan for the Development of African SMEs each, and a China-Africa production capacity cooperation fund with the initial capital of 10 billion dollars. "China-Africa relations have today reached a stage of growth unmatched in history," Xi said. "Let's join hands ... and open a new era of China-Africa win-win cooperation and common development."