Chinese Foreign Minister visits Peru to strengthen ties

Latin America

Chinese Foreign Minister visits Peru

In a show of the strengthening ties between China and Latin America, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Peru as part of a four country Latin American visit. The visit also includes Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia.

CCTV America’s Dan Collyns reports.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, following Yi’s visit to Ecuador. The Peru visit was ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the nation in November for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.

President Kuczynski was in China in September for an official visit in an effort to consolidate ties with it’s largest trading partner.

“I think first of all China has huge experience in infrastructure and we have some major infrastructure projects that we want to push forward,” Kuczynski told CCTV.

“One of them is what we call the ‘tren de cercanias’ the neighborhood train which goes from about 250 km north of Lima to 300 km south that would enable Peru to have a metropolitan plan for Lima which is a city today of 11 million people and soon it will be 20 million people and the Chinese have a lot of experience in that,” the Peruvian president said.

Peru serves as the region’s principle hub for mining investment, which accounts for a third of the country’s overall portfolio. The country is also aiming to boost its agriculture experts and is seeking China’s technical help and infrastructure development assistance.

Bilateral trade between Peru and China has quadrupled in the last 15 years to more than 16 billion dollars in 2015.