10 September 2002 00:00
RUSSIAN PRIME MINISTER MIKHAIL KASYANOV MEETS WITH PRC STATE COUNCIL PREMIER ZHU RONGJI
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has held a meeting in St. Petersburg with Zhu Rongji, the Premier of the State Council of the PRC. In the course of the talks the sides discussed a broad range of questions, including trade-and-economic cooperation, as well as the prospects of collaboration in the fields of culture, education, tourism and health.
Kasyanov said that Russia and China have wide-ranging possibilities to actively develop relations in the domains of education, tourism and health. In particular, that can involve the exchange of students as well as dissemination in Russia of the methods of Chinese medicine, he noted. In addition, discussions covered standardization in pharmacology, joint activities in the health area, and efforts to increase the number of Russian tourists visiting China.
The head of the Russian Government also said that Russia and China highly assess the bilateral level of trade and economic relations. Trade between the two countries in the current year will reach 10 billion dollars. Only two years ago it constituted 5.5 billion dollars. Kasyanov noted also the changes in the pattern of Russian exports, reporting that whereas two years ago supplies of engineering products from Russia to China constituted only 5 percent of the total volume of supplies, now this indicator has reached 20 percent. At the same time the sides emphasized that so far the volume of Russian export to China greatly exceeds the volumes of Chinese supplies to the Russian market. In this connection Zhu Rongji confirmed China's intention to increase the volume of export to Russia.
The largest growth area of cooperation between Russia and China, in Kasyanov's view, is joint ventures in the field of high technologies, in particular, the creation of new aircraft models. Besides, he indicated that in the future cooperation must develop in the fields of telecommunications and space.
At the end of the Russian-Chinese talks seven agreements were signed, all to further expand trade and economic ties. In particular, a contract was signed between Russia's Ministry of Energy and YUKOS and Transneft companies, and China's national oil and gas company and the State Planning Commission of the PRC for carrying out a feasibility study for an oil pipeline from Russia to China. In addition, the sides signed two documents in the field of aviation: an intergovernmental agreement on flight safety and a contract for the delivery to China of five Russian Tu-204-120C planes.
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