China and Ethiopia have a promising prospect of practical cooperation built on the basis of mutual benefit and win-win. Ethiopia’s leaders highly praise out of their deep heart: Among Ethiopia’s global development partners, the first partner is China! The second is China! The third is still China!

    The highway from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to Adama, the second largest city of Ethiopia, is always the main truck of Ethiopia’s logistic transportation. Every day, there are countless cargo and passenger vehicles coming to and from Addis Ababa and Port Djibouti through this highway, however, this highway is so crowded all the year and has become the bottleneck of Ethiopia’s logistics for international trade. What’s delightful is that this situation is about to be greatly improved: Addis Ababa-Adama (AA) Expressway contracted to Chinese enterprises is just completed. 

    It is the first expressway in Ethiopia, as well the expressway at the largest scale and at the top level in East Africa; Chinese enterprises not only are responsible for its design and construction, but also build the wind power plants along it; Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, the first modern railway in Ethiopia, is under construction by builders from China and Ethiopia; Oriental Industrial Park, the first industrial park in Ethiopia, is built by Chinese private enterprises. These large-scale infrastructure construction projects and manufacturers not only reflect a promising prospect of Ethiopia’s economic and social development, but also present a miniature of achievements of mutual beneficial cooperation between China and Ethiopia in recent years.

    Although it is still in the queue of least developed countries, Ethiopia has become one of ten countries that develop fastest as judged based on the annual average and double-digit economic growth ratio in recent ten years. Ethiopia will become not only the hub of interconnection in East Africa, but also the manufacturing center in Africa. In Ethiopia, a country without rich resources, infrastructure construction and manufacturing, are just like two wheels driving the economic development. Fruitful outcomes of economic and trade cooperation between China and Ethiopia add more power to these two “wheels”.

    In the field of infrastructure consturction, over 90% of highways, national communication network, the first railway, the first light railway, the first wind power plant and several important hydropower stations are built or co-built by Chinese enterprises. In 2013, China’s engineering contract market in Ethiopia rose sharply, with the whole-year newly-concluded contract amount of USD 6 billion and the completed contract amount of USD 2.3 billion.

    In the field of manufacturing, China, as the largest trade partner and the largest foreign capital provider of Ethiopia, goes on increasing its investment scale in Ethiopia in recent years. Oriental Industrial Park built by China-invested enterprises was listed by the Ethiopian Government as a prior project of industrial development in 2008 and has become the investment promotion platform at the largest scale with the most advanced facilities and the most complete conditions in Ethiopia. In it, there are many manufacturing enterprises, including shoes makers, vehicle assembly companies, cement manufacturers, etc. the total number of employees has exceeded 3800 and there are 3400 posts for Ethiopians. Huajian Shoemaking in it is the largest shoemaker in Ethiopia and its woman shoes take over 50% of Ethiopia’s shoes export share, driving the development of local leatherworking, transportation, logistics, farm and other fields.