2016年CRI Official: Preparation for CAEXPO 2016 Smooth（在线收听）

The 13th China-ASEAN expo will open in early September in Nanning, southwestern China's Guangxi Autonomous Region.

Around 1,500 government officials, business men, experts and scholars are expected to attend the business and investment event.

Zhang Xiaoqin, vice governor of Guangxi, says production capacity cooperation will be a major area the expo addresses.

"This expo will promote international production capacity cooperation. This year, an international cooperation exhibition on production capacity will be held, along with working program between project owners and investors, a round-table meeting on production capacity among countries along the Lancangjiang-Mekong River region."

The development of the Indo-China Peninsula Economic Corridor and China-ASEAN port city network is also to be high on agenda.

A series of business-matching programs and forums will be held during the event, focusing on road, railway, port and logistics projects in the region.

Zhang says the expo this time is also tasked with promoting industrial parks.

"The 13th expo will host promotion conference on ASEAN industrial park, promotion conference on Chinese and overseas industrial park, and a round-table meeting on China-ASEAN investment cooperation to further boost industrial upgrading and cross-border cooperation."

As a tradition, a series of forums have been scheduled as part of the expo to deepen cooperation in various fields.

Zhang says a total of 35 forums will boost cooperation in such areas as technology, agriculture, environment protection and poverty-reduction.

Vietnam is the theme country of this year's forum activity, while Sri Lanka has been invited as a special guest country.

Yin Zonghua, Vice-Chair of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, says among the highlights of the forums will be one between business leaders.

"We will continue to hold the China-ASEAN Business Leaders Forum. The guests will hold deep discussions during television interviews on topics like economic and trade cooperation in the framework of the 'Belt and Road' initiative."

The scheduled forums also include a round-table meeting between the Vietnamese leadership and the Chinese entrepreneurs and a symposium on China-ASEAN business law cooperation.

This year's expo is held at a time when a sharp decline was reported in the bilateral trade after more than two decades of strong growth.

In the first five months this year, overall trade between China and ASEAN countries is down around 7-percent.

This is compared with an average growth of 18.5-percent per year before.

China's Commerce Ministry is pointing to a sluggish world economy as one of the factors behind the significant slowdown, noting the two sides are in the process of upgrading the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in 2010.

Those upgrades will focus mostly on areas such as goods, services, investment, as well as economic and technological cooperation.

Both sides have a goal of seeing trade volumes hit one-trillion US dollars by 2020.

For CRI, this is Liu Yuanhui.