Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shakes hands with his French counterpart Francois Hollande during their meeting in Brisbane, Australia, Nov. 16, 2014. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his French counterpart Francois Hollande agreed here Sunday to continuously deepen their countries' comprehensive strategic partnership.
Meeting with Hollande on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit, Xi said that during his state visit to France in March, he and President Hollande jointly decided to bring the Sino-French comprehensive strategic partnership into a new era.
Over the past half year since then, a series of consensuses reached between the two sides have been implemented actively and effectively, and bilateral ties have been upgraded and accelerated in an all-round way, said Xi.
The two sides have witnessed positive progress in their cooperation on nuclear energy, finance and trade as well as over 800 celebration events marking the 50th anniversary of the establishment of their diplomatic ties, said Xi.
Both sides should maintain such positive momentum, make good use of the strategic, financial and people-to-people dialogue and cooperation mechanisms and endeavor to make greater progress in pragmatic cooperation and people-to-people exchanges, said Xi.
He added that China stands ready to work with France to help African countries fight the Ebola epidemic and supports France to gain positive results in hosting the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015.
For his part, Hollande said President Xi's visit to France has opened a new chapter for the French-Chinese relationship, thanking China for adopting a lot of important measures to promote bilateral ties.
He hoped that the two nations could keep close high-level exchanges and continuously push forward important and large-scale cooperation projects, noting that France will simplify visa procedures for Chinese citizens.
France welcomes China's recently announced targets of reducing carbon emission, said Hollande, adding that such actions will strongly help the UNFCCC in Paris to yield positive results.
He stated that France is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China on combating the Ebola disease, Africa's development, the Iranian nuclear issue and anti-terrorism issue, among others.
Xi arrived here late Friday for the G20 Summit and a state visit to Australia.