Belt and Road initiative shows results

Last year, trade volumes between China and countries along the Belt and Road amounted to $1.1-trillion, up 14.8% year on year, which is 3.4 percentage points higher than the growth of the country’s total foreign trade, Chinese Minister of Commerce Zhong Shan told a press conference on March 11.

The Belt and Road initiative, proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, refers to building a Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

Over the past five years, the initiative has been positively echoed by more than 140 countries and regions, and fruitful cooperation achievements have been yielded under its framework, Zhong told the press conference, held on the sidelines of the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress.

Praising a more diversified investment portfolio, the minister said that China has altogether invested more than $60bn in on-route countries in various sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing and infrastructure. The first unit of the Port Qasim coal-fired power plant was inaugurated on November 29, 2017 in Karachi, Pakistan. It is the first energy project under the cooperation framework of the ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Below: Workers make high-end sticky tape to be sold to the US at the plant of a technology company in Fuzhou, east China’s Jiangxi province.

Bin, CFP Lv Parcels to be sent to the US via EMS arrive at the Yiwu International Mail Exchange Centre in Yiwu, east China’s Zhejiang province. The amount of mail items handled by the bureau has exceeded 100-million, of which 99.8million are international mail. /