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Kremlin administration chief arrives on three-day visit to China

Later on Wednesday Sergei Ivanov will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping

BEIJING, July 09 /ITAR-TASS/. Sergei Ivanov, the head of the Kremlin administration, on Wednesday arrived on a three-day working visit to China.

Later on Wednesday, he will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and member of the Political Bureau and Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee Li Zhanshu. He also plans to visit the Centre of the Russian Language of the Beijing University of Foreign Languages. Several hundred Chinese universities offer Russian language and literature classes, with the overall number of students exceeding 65,000.

On Thursday, July 10, Ivanov will go to the city of Guiyang, the capital of the southwestern province of Guizhou, where he will meet with Vice President Li Yuanchao. On Friday, July 11, the Kremlin administration chief will visit the international eco-civilization forum. Held in Guiyang since 2009, the forum focuses on ways to change traditional approaches to production and consumption to environment-aware ones. These annual event bring together former and current top-ranking politicians, officials, top executives of big companies, scientists, in including Nobel Prize winners. The forum enjoys support from the United Nations, UNESCO and a number of other international organizations.

The Russian-Chinese relations are developing dynamically in various spheres, which is proved by frequent top-level contacts between the two countries. Thus, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s paid a visit to China in May 2014, which was crowned by the signing of a big contract on Russian East Siberian gas supplies to China. After that, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin visited that country. China’s President Xi Jinping visited Russia in 2013 and in February 2014 [to attend the Sochi Olympic Winter Games]. Vice President Li Yuanchao attended the Petersburg International Economic Forum in May 2014.

China is ranked among Russia’s key trade-and-economic partners, accounting for about 11% in Russia’s foreign trade in 2013. In the first quarter of 2014, bilateral trade demonstrated a four percent growth on the same period 2013. Notably, Russia’s exports to China went up by 13.4%, while imports went down by 2.6% As of the end of 2013, China’s aggregate investments in Russia stood at 32.12 billion U.S. dollars, or up by 15% on 2013, of which 17 billion U.S. dollars were direct investments.