ISLAMABAD, 6 April 2005 — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao held talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz yesterday as the close allies signed a raft of military, economic and trade agreements, officials said.
Wen is making his maiden South Asian tour as premier, a weeklong swing through the strategically and economically important region that will also include trips to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Local residents banging drums and waving Pakistani and Chinese flags lined Islamabad’s main boulevard and the city was decked with banners welcoming Wen, who landed at Chaklala air base near the capital just before 6 p.m. (1300 GMT).
Officials said a total of 20 agreements were signed in the presence of Wen, who assumed office in March last year, and Aziz.
“The two leaders held formal talks in a cordial atmosphere at the prime minister house,” a Pakistani official said after the meeting. “Later the two prime ministers signed agreements in various fields including defense, combating terrorism, separatism and extremism, agriculture and tourism,” the official added. Wen, accompanied by a delegation of 70 Chinese officials and businessmen on his trip, will meet President Pervez Musharraf today.
China has long been Pakistan’s strongest ally and provides its neighbor with both development funding and weapons.
Pakistan has helped Beijing combat separatism in the northwest Chinese region of Xinjiang, while Islamabad is itself engaged in a drawn-out hunt for Al-Qaeda militants.
Musharraf yesterday launched the production in Pakistan of JF-17 Thunder fighter jets that have been jointly developed by the two countries.
“The friendship between Pakistan and China is deeper than the ocean and higher than mountains and we will continue to maintain this friendship,” he told air force officers at the Aeronuatical Complex at Kamra near the capital. Musharraf said the homegrown jets would become the mainstay of Pakistan’s Air Force, alongside F-16s that Washington announced it would sell to Islamabad last month.
On the eve of Wen’s visit, Islamabad said it would buy four Chinese-built frigates for the Pakistan Navy. The agreements signed yesterday also included deepening the Chinese-funded, multi-million-dollar seaport at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea in southwest Pakistan.
He will deliver a keynote address to a 26-member forum of ministers from Asian and Middle Eastern countries to take place today and tomorrow in Islamabad.
Aziz and Wen will address a business forum in Islamabad attended by 400 Pakistani and over 100 Chinese businessmen, whom officials said were interested in investing in IT and telecoms, mining, oil and gas, engineering and agriculture. China is also looking to Pakistan as a transit route for oil from the Gulf.
