Xi's proposals chart course for future Sino-African ties

Huge potential for cooperation

When the forum was first established in 2000, trade volume between China and Africa stood at 10 billion dollars.

Now China has become the continent's largest trading partner, with two-way trade volume expected to reach 300 billion dollars in 2015, according to the Ministry of Commerce of China.

Also, analysts predict that China's investment in Africa will continue to rise. This is in line with the vision of Premier Li Keqiang, who pledged to boost China's investment in Africa to some 100 billion dollars by 2020.

Twenty years ago, China's industrial capacity cooperation with Africa hardly featured in international discussions, Ikiara said.

However, this situation has radically changed with the African countries now regarding China as the most suitable partner in their national industrialization and other development programs, he added.

"Africa's manufacturing capacity failed to obtain meaningful development during the past decades," but it now provides huge opportunities for industrial cooperation between the two sides as well as enough space for further development, said Fay Chung, an African scholar of Chinese descendant in Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, China's engagement with Africa is changing. After decades of helping African countries build infrastructure and providing aid, China has seen more companies in Africa expand their presence in other wider fields such as agriculture, transportation and environmental protection.

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.

In Xi's speech, China and Africa are described as a community with a common destiny as they share similar historical experiences and similar courses of struggle for independence and development. What's more, they also share the achievements of joint development.

An example of south-south cooperation

South-South cooperation, namely, economic and technological cooperation among the world's developing countries, is a great undertaking that unites developing nations in their efforts to pursue self-reliance and continuous progress.

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.

During the High-Level Roundtable on South-South Cooperation co-hosted by China and the Untied Nations in late September, President Xi brought forth a four-point proposal and a package of initiatives to help boost development in developing countries.

The South has become a major impetus for global growth and South-South cooperation has become a major supplement to international development cooperation, Xi stressed at the meeting.

"China-Africa cooperation, as an important and major part of the South-South cooperation, is proved to be successful," Macharia said, adding that it has shown to the world how the two sides, in different continents and being far apart from each other, join their hands to achieve common growth and prosperity.

As the overall strength of developing nations grows, China-Africa cooperation as well as South-South cooperation are set to play a bigger role in promoting the collective rise of developing countries and generating a solid, sustained and inclusive growth of the world economy.

"Sino-African cooperation will inject fresh vigor into global economic recovery despite some complex challenges we are facing," Ikiara said.