Part A

　　China is a developing country. Over the years, while focusing on its own development, China has been providing aid to the best of its ability to other developing countries with economic difficulties, and fulfilling its due international obligations.

　　China remains a developing country with a low per-capita income and a large poverty-stricken population. In spite of this, China has been doing its best to provide foreign aid, to help recipient countries to strengthen their self-development capacity, enrich and improve their peoples’ livelihood, and promote their economic growth and social progress. Through foreign aid, China has consolidated friendly relations and economic and trade cooperation with other developing countries, promoted South-South cooperation and contributed to the common development of mankind.

　　Adhering to equality and mutual benefit, stressing substantial results, and keeping pace with the times without imposing any political conditions on recipient countries, China’s foreign aid has emerged as a model with its own characteristics.

　　China’s foreign aid policy adheres to equality, mutual benefit and common development, and keeps pace with the times.

　　China’s foreign aid policy has distinct characteristics of the times. It is suited both to China’s actual conditions and the needs of the recipient countries. China has been constantly

　　enriching, improving and developing the Eight Principles for Economic Aid and Technical Assistance to Other Countries — the guiding principles of China’s foreign aid put forward in the 1960s. China is the world’s largest developing country, with a large population, a poor foundation and uneven economic development. As development remains an arduous and long-standing task, China’s foreign aid falls into the category of South-South cooperation and is mutual help between developing countries.

　　Currently, the environment for global development is not favor-able. With the repercussions of the international financial crisis continuing to linger, global concerns such as climate change, food crisis, energy and resource security, and epidemic of diseases have brought new challenges to developing countries

　　Against this background, China has a long way to go in providing foreign aid. The Chinese government will make efforts to optimize the country’s foreign aid structure, improve the quality of foreign aid, further increase recipient countries’ capacity in independent development, and improve the pertinence and effectiveness of foreign aid. As an important member of the international community, China will continue to promote South-South cooperation, as it always has done, gradually increase its foreign aid input on the basis of the continuous development of its economy, promote the realization of the UN Millennium Development Goals, and make unremitting efforts to build, together with other countries, a prosperous and harmonious world with lasting peace.