China and France have made greater progress in economic and trade cooperation in the first 10 months of this year than the whole of 2004, the Chinese Embassy in Paris told Xinhua on the eve of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to France.

Wen is expected to arrive in Paris Sunday for a four-day official visit.

Cooperation has been pushed to a higher level and the fields of cooperation have been expanded, said a diplomat from the embassy.

The trade volume in the first 10 months of this year totalled 16.6 billion US dollars, with French exports to China standing at 7.2 billion dollars and the Chinese exports to France at 9.4 billion dollars, according to statistics from the embassy.

It is fully possible that the total volume in 2005 will break last year's record of 17.58 billion dollars, making France the European Union's second largest exporter to the Chinese market, said the diplomat.

In terms of direct investment in China, France ranks as the EU's third largest and the world's No. 10.

By October this year, 2,849 French-invested projects worth 7.25 billion dollars have been approved in China. In the first nine months this year alone, China has welcomed 241 projects, with a total investment of 850 million dollars, from French enterprises, according to the embassy.

France is also one of the major technology exporters to China, ranking the second after Germany in Europe and the fourth in the world.

By the end of October, China has registered 2,580 projects of technology exports worth 13.41 billion dollars from France, of which 155 projects, or 700 million dollars in value, were signed during the first half of this year.

Sino-French cooperation is particularly fruitful in aviation and space, nuclear, railway, automobile and agriculture.

Toulouse-based Airbus has sold 307 civilian planes to China, accounting for a 34-percent share of the Chinese market.

In the field of nuclear energy cooperation between the two countries, China has always been a heavyweight client of France's nuclear equipment.

China's order of 60 high-speed trains from France's Alstom company last year marked a new page for the cooperation in railway transport.

Three French automobile giants -- Peugeot, Citroen and Renault -- have gained a share in the Chinese market. Renault will soon set up its truck production base in the south of China.

Carrefour, France's No. 1 retailer, has set up 270 shops in China, of which 65 are supermarkets.

The year of 2005 also witnessed a rapid growth in the cooperation between small- and medium-sized enterprises of the two countries.

With the government-sponsored program of "1,000 PMEs (the French abbreviation for small- and medium-sized enterprises) into China," four successive groups of French entrepreneurs from small businesses have visited China this year to "get a touch of the opportunity" there.

A salon of French furniture in Beijing in July, a fair of Chinese and French PMEs in Guangzhou in September and an event on PME cooperation in Shanghai in November further pushed forward the exchange and cooperation between the small businesses of the two countries.

"The big stride forward is registered in the context of steadily warming relations between China and France," the diplomat said. "In 2004, heads of state of the two countries paid a visit to the other's country and decided to establish a global strategic partnership, ushering bilateral cooperation into a new phase."

The Year of China in France and the Year of France in China further deepened the bilateral relations, he said.

Chinese Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai visited France in May. And French Minister-Delegate for Foreign Commerce Christine Lagarde has paid three visits to China since she took office earlier this year, said the diplomat.

As the world's biggest developing country with abundant labor force and broad market prospects, the economic growth that China is expected to achieve will provide huge opportunities for French enterprises, he said.

He also noted that France, as an industrial nation with leading science and technologies, possesses up-to-date products in areas to which China gives priority in its economic development. These include nuclear, transportation, aviation and space, agriculture, petro-chemistry and environmental protection.

"That's why the economic and trade cooperation between China and France enjoys broad prospects in short, medium and long terms, " the diplomat noted.

Source: Xinhua