| Mr. Gao Hucheng, Vice Minister of Commerce led a governmental economic and trade delegation to India |
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| Tuesday,November 18,2008 Posted: 19:44 BJT(44 GMT) |
| From:Commercial Office Article type:Original |
In order to implement consensus reached by leaders of India and China during Indian Prime Minister’s visit to China in January this year, to promote healthy development of bilateral trade between the two countries, and fully propel bilateral economic and trade cooperation, Mr. Gao Hucheng, Honorable Vice Minister of Commerce, P. R. China led a governmental economic and trade delegation, as well as a business procurement delegation to India from October 9-12, 2008.
During his visit, Mr. Gao Hucheng held talks with Mr. Kamal Nath, Minister of commerce and Industry and Mr. Jairam Ramesh, Minister of state for Commerce respectively. He also held official talks with Mr. G K Pillai, Commerce Secretary of India. During their talks, both sides had in-depth exchanges of views on strengthening bilateral trade, mutual investment, FTA, trade remedy, trade facilitation measure, enlarging border trade, pushing forward WTO Doha Development Round negotiation, current international financial crisis, and other issues of common interest. Mr. Gao Hucheng, along with his Indian counterparts, also attended the signing ceremonies of MOU on Trade Remedy Cooperation and B-to-B procurement agreements.
The business procurement delegation is composed of about 60 members from 16 large manufacturing and trade enterprises of China, including the Fortune 500 companies, such as Sinochem Corporation, China Minmetals Corporation and China Aluminum Corp. etc. They actively negotiated with Indian exporters in expanding the imports of competitive products from India, such as sea products, cotton, sesame, rapeseed meals, iron ore, castor oil and chemical products. The two sides signed contracts and MOUs amounting to about 400 million USD.
In recent years, benefiting from the guidance and instructions of the leaders of both countries, bilateral economic and trade cooperation between China and India has been developing steadily, and especially the bilateral trade has been increasing in a very fast manner. According to the statistics of China’s Customs, bilateral trade volume totaled USD 38.7 billion in 2007, up by 56% than the previous year. During the first 8 months of this year, bilateral trade volume reached 37.9 billion USD, up 59% compared with the same period of last year.
India and China share great complementarities. Bilateral economic and trade cooperation with advantage sharing, mutual benefit and win-win situation serves the long and common interest of the two countries. China does not seek trade surplus. Rather it hopes that bilateral trade can approach a balance gradually and realize sound development instead. Therefore, China has been taking measures to expand imports from India, including holding South Asian Countries Commodity Fair, building up international pavilion for India at Canton Fair and so on. Mr. Gao Hucheng’s visit to India again shows the sincerity of Chinese side and is one of important measures for easing up the trade imbalance between India and China. In future, Chinese Government will keep on implementing positive measures to further expand imports from India, and boost sound and steady development of economic and trade relationship between India and China.
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Bilateral Visits
