adminKamangeni Phiri Midlands Bureau Chief
China will continue working closely with Zimbabwe in its economic revival drive encapsulated in the Zimbabwe Agenda for Socio-Economic Transformation despite efforts by Western countries to paint the Asian giant in negative light, Chinese Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Ambassador Lin Lin has said.
Delivering a public lecture at the Midlands State University yesterday, Ambassador Lin said the West was bent on tarnishing China’s image by dismissing its products as “cheap” yet the so-called developed countries also imported Chinese goods.
He said President Mugabe’s State visit to China was so successful that Zimbabwe’s enemies were now jealous.
“China and Zimbabwe relations are making progress in every respect. Political trust is deepening. End of August this year, President Mugabe paid a very successful state visit to China which started a new chapter of our open friendship. The two countries have stood together in peace and war. During this visit, Chinese leaders held official talks with President Mugabe . . . They were not engaged in empty talks instead they were fruitful, very fruitful in terms of political mutual trust, trade, investment, and pragmatic economic cooperation. And also the signing of nine cooperation documents. Both sides cherish the long friendship between our two countries which was formed in the days of fighting together and we’re ready to continue working together to carry forward the tradition of friendship and extend cooperation to various fields,” he said.
Ambassador Lin said the two countries agreed to further enhance cooperation in areas like agriculture, infrastructure development, manufacturing, human resource training and people’s exchange programmes.
“The Chinese side would like to provide assistance within these areas for Zimbabwe to develop its economy, improve its people’s livelihood and realise food security. The Zimbabwe side welcomes Chinese enterprises to invest in Zimbabwe and carry out beneficiating cooperation. Our investment volumes surpassed $1.1 billion in 2013 almost doubling that of 2010.
Zimbabwe mainly imported chemicals, machinery and equipment, shoes and garments from China while it exported minerals, cotton and tobacco and various products to us. Tobacco remains the biggest Zimbabwe export to China. Chinese investment in Zimbabwe reached $602 million in 2013 which was the largest Chinese investment in Africa and the Chinese being the biggest investors in Zimbabwe”.
Ambassador Lin said China consistently provided assistance to Zimbabwe.
He said Chinese banks provided over $1 billion worth of concessionary and commercial grants to Zimbabwe for projects including the construction of key infrastructure, that included hospitals and roads and the expansion of Kariba Power Station.
Ambassador Lin said his country was sincere in helping Zimbabwe develop and castigated jealous Western media for trying to tarnish China’s image.
“The Western media is behind the propaganda that Chinese goods are of cheap quality. They want to tarnish our image and our relationship with Zimbabwe. The West were Africa’s colonisers for more than 100 years. They were responsible for socio-economic development of this country. Now they’ve put Zimbabwe on sanctions. Zimbabwe suffered a lot and China came to help. In the past three years China development assistance amounts to over $100 million.
“It’s not true that China makes goods of a poor quality. Our products are quality products. We’ve isolated cases of unscrupulous business people who at times opt to export cheap products to maximise profits,” he said.
He said Western countries and the United States were some of China’s biggest markets for its products.
Responding to questions from students, Ambassador Lin said his country was involved in developing infrastructure and other social amenities in the country contrary to reports that China was after exploiting Zimbabwe minerals only.
Ambassador Lin commended Zimbabwe for developing its people through education.
He, however, said the Southern African nation still needs to work on its policies for it to contain the soaring unemployment figures.
“We’ve a population of more than 1 billion in China which is more than 100 times that of Zimbabwe. We produce more than 30 million from our universities. We’ve an unemployment of about 900, 000 people only because we came up with ways of dealing with that problem. Zimbabwe needs to come up with more policies that make the environment attractive to investors,” said Ambassador Lin.
Online Reporter