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China, Africa end summit with deals and aid pledge
2006-11-05
Chinese and African leaders wrapped up a summit on Sunday with deals worth $1.9 billion and assurances from Beijing it would not monopolize Africa's resources as it builds influence in the continent. The agreements, signed between 12 Chinese firms and African governments and companies, followed Chinese President Hu Jintao's pledge on Saturday to offer $5 billion in loans and credit, and to double aid to Africa by 2009. In a joint declaration ending the summit, delegates announced a strategic partnership and "action plan" that charts cooperation in the economy, international affairs and social development. "We propose to enhance South-South cooperation and North-South dialogue to promote balanced, coordinated and sustainable development of the global economy ...," said Hu, reading out the declaration. Delegates from nearly 50 African nations descended on Beijing for the weekend summit, the largest China-Africa gathering since the 1949 founding of Communist China. The deals agreed on Sunday include commitments from China to build expressways in Nigeria, lay a telephone network in rural Ghana and erect an aluminum smelter in Egypt, state-run Xinhua news agency said. China, the world's fourth-largest economy and second-largest energy user, is keen to secure oil, gas and mineral resources from Africa to fuel its rapid economic expansion. But Beijing has come under fire from critics who say it is doing business with African countries without regard to governance or human rights and in the process bolstering regimes the West has tried to isolate. Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin rejected such criticism, saying the relationship was helping to fight poverty in Africa and that the continent needed cooperation without political conditions. "This has nothing to do with turning a blind eye to the predicaments of Africa," he told a news conference. "It is to promote human values, including human rights. Is not the right to development a human rights issue?" BOOMING OIL TRADE China's trade with Africa is expected to top $50 billion this year, and Premier Wen Jiabao, in a speech to a China-Africa business forum on Saturday, called for the trading partners to expand that to $100 billion by 2010. Africa now supplies a third of China's crude oil imports, with Angola its largest supplier in the year through September. Chinese oil firms were also close to entering more oil and gas blocks in Nigeria after the state-run producer CNOOC paid $2.7 billion in April for a 45 percent stake in an oilfield there. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing defended China's oil business in Africa, which includes dealing in Sudan, a country facing Western sanctions over violence in its Darfur region. "China does not seek a monopoly on oil resources. We do not seek to exclude or influence other countries from Africa's oil," he told a news conference. Li also stressed the strategic importance of Africa to China as a voting bloc, saying it was thanks to votes from African countries that China was able to regain its United Nations seat in 1971 and bid successfully for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China seemed ready to return the favor, with a call in the joint declaration for African countries to have a bigger role in a reformed U.N. The summit was also an opportunity for Beijing to prove its credentials at hosting a major event ahead of the 2008 Olympics. The city was decked out in banners proclaiming the Sino-African friendship, strict traffic measures kept Beijing's notoriously clogged roads running smoothly and the estimated 1,700 delegates were treated to gala song and dance performances.
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