On August 29, Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and World Bank jointly held the International Seminar on Capacity Building in Development and Cooperation in Beijing. Gao Hucheng, Vice Minister of Commerce and China International Trade Representative, and Sanjay Pradhan, Vice President of World Bank, attended and addressed the opening ceremony. Vice Minister of Commerce Fu Ziying chaired the opening ceremony and gave a keynote speech at the seminar. Totally over 100 top officials, well-known specialists and scholars at home and abroad from 21 countries of Asia, Africa and Europe and 4 international organizations including World Bank and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) attended the seminar.

Mr. Gao said that, as being committed to self-development, China has also being actively sharing its development experience with other developing countries. China has stuck to the concept of “teaching a man to fish other than giving him a fish” in foreign aid, and has help recipient countries enhance capacity of independent development through many ways of assistance. At the UN High-Level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals 2010, the Chinese government made a commitment to provide 80,000 training and research opportunities for developing countries within 5 years, and at the same time to strengthen cooperation with developing countries on such fields as agriculture, medical treatment and sanitation, science and education, clean energy, disaster prevention and mitigation, economic management, construction of development zones and infrastructure construction. China hopes to, through the above efforts and together with the international community, to help the developing countries to continuously raise development capacity, and promote the early achievement of UN Millennium Development Goals.

Sanjay Pradhan said that, China’s successful development experience is unique, which has provided valuable lessons for other developing countries even the entire international community. China and other emerging economies is playing a more and more important role in sharing development experience with other countries, which is focus of attention of the World Bank in the process of strengthening cooperation with developing countries.

Mr. Fu elaborated, in his keynote speech, on China’s experience of capacity building in international cooperation. He pointed out that capacity building is an important principle in China’s foreign assistance, which lay stress on cooperation no matter it is infrastructure construction, supply of equipment, or technological transfer and medical care. He hopes the international community could increase input, highlight priority, innovate methods and reinforce cooperation, so as to jointly raise capacity building level.

The seminar aims at sharing experience and effective methods on capacity building and knowledge sharing in international development cooperation, and exploring new ways to strengthen international cooperation in this field. The participants of the seminar made extensive discussion and in-depth exchange of views over three subjects: experience sharing on capacity building and knowledge sharing in international development cooperation, opportunities and challenges faced by developing countries in capacity building, and strengthening international development cooperation on capacity building and knowledge sharing.