Pragmatic Cooperation On Various Fronts to Fortify China-Africa Ties

One year has elapsed since the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) convened last September.

China and Africa have made undaunted efforts to carry out practical cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual benefit despite the rise of protectionism, and initial results have been achieved.

In order to build a China-Africa community with a shared future, China and African countries have been implementing consensus made at the Johannesburg and Beijing summits of the FOCAC held in 2015 and 2018 to align their respective development strategies.

The first China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo was successfully held in June in Changsha, the capital city of central China's Hunan Province.

A total of 84 deals worth 20.8 billion U.S. dollars were reached in trade, agriculture, tourism and other fields during the three-day expo.

This week, Chinese President Xi Jinping's special envoy Yang Jiechi is paying official visits to Kenya, Nigeria and Sierra Leone to exchange views with African leaders on promoting bilateral ties as well as international and regional issues of common concern.

Yang's tour will facilitate the implementation of the action plan adopted at the FOCAC Beijing Summit in September 2018.

Health, hunger and development are always tough tasks in Africa. China has always been lending a helping hand to Africa in those fields. Decades on, China has sent medical teams to help Africans fight epidemics while dispatching agricultural experts and providing financial and technical support for Africa's infrastructure transformation and poverty reduction.

Since 1963, some 220 million patients in 48 African countries have been treated by Chinese medical personnel as of 2018, according to the National Health Commission. Currently, 983 Chinese doctors are providing free medical services in 45 African countries.

"China has significantly contributed to Africa's ongoing combat against the Ebola outbreak as well as to the development of the Africa CDC, or the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," according to John Nkengasong, director of the young institution. "A friend in need is a friend indeed."

In 2014, when the Ebola outbreak wreaked havoc in West Africa, China immediately sent some 1,200 medical workers and communicable disease experts to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to help overcome the crisis, in stark contrast to some countries which were primarily focused on evacuating their own citizens out of the Ebola-hit land. -Xinhua

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