Leaders call for deeper Sino-Kazakh relations

As the climax of the recent high-level interactions between China and Kazakhstan, President Xi Jinping and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sent congratulatory messages on Friday to the opening ceremony of the 2024 Kazakhstan Year of Tourism in China.

In his message to the event in Beijing, Xi noted that in recent years, the bilateral cultural cooperation between China and Kazakhstan has been flourishing and the mutual visa exemption agreement has taken effect.

Last year, Xi and Tokayev jointly declared 2024 as the Kazakhstan Year of Tourism in China.

Xi voiced his hope that the two countries can take this year as an opportunity to promote tourism cooperation, encourage mutual visits and renew their traditional friendship.

"Together we can take our bilateral relations into another golden 30 years and make new contributions to the China-Kazakhstan community with a shared future," he wrote.

In 2013, Xi proposed the Belt and Road Initiative for the first time in Kazakhstan. For more than a decade, China and Kazakhstan have achieved remarkable success in their wide-ranging cooperation with the focus on Belt and Road, he noted.

In his message, Tokayev said it is deeply symbolic that the opening ceremony is taking place in Beijing, one of the leading economic, political and cultural centers of the world.

"Relations between our countries are steadily developing in the spirit of friendship, good neighborliness and eternal strategic partnership," he wrote.

Zhao Leji, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, met with Tokayev on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2024 in Boao, Hainan province, on Thursday.

On Friday, Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang met with visiting Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Murat Nurtleu in Beijing.

Also on Friday, China and Kazakhstan jointly announced the establishment of a mechanism for strategic dialogue between the foreign ministers of the two countries. Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Nurtleu co-chaired the first strategic dialogue in Beijing.