Beijing – China and Venezuela cemented here Thursday economic ties worth billions of dollars and political alliances designed to boost the “anti-imperialist” South American nation’s hopes of playing a bigger role on the world stage.
And the two countries’ presidents, Hu Jintao and Hugo Chavez, promised that the best was yet to come.
Hu and Chavez agreed that the bilateral relationship is already solid “and that the greatest is the horizon in front of us,” the host said.
After the two presidents met in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to seal more than a half-dozen accords, the Venezuelan told journalists that while the pacts sealed Thursday represent tens of millions of dollars, even more trade and collaboration is on the way.
“We have elevated the strategic relationship to a very solid higher level. What’s been signed is already great in energy, technology, housing, investment in railroads, oil-drilling equipment, satellites and agricultural cooperation – a set of accords at a high strategic level. But, as Hu said, the greatest is the horizon in front of us,” the visitor said.
Earlier Thursday, Chavez said Hu committed China to backing Venezuela’s bid for a non-permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.
“President Hu has told us that China supports Venezuela in its aspiration to form part of the Security Council,” Chavez told reporters. “It is very important support, from both a political and moral point of view.”
The U.S. government, which Chavez regularly blasts as “imperialist” and bellicose, opposes a seat for Venezuela on the council. The Bush administration views the leftist firebrand as a threat to democracy in Latin America and supports Guatemala’s bid to replace Argentina as a temporary council member beginning next year.
This is Chavez’s fourth visit to the People’s Republic since he became Venezuela’s president in early 1999.
With the presidents looking on, Chinese and Venezuelan government ministers put their signatures to eight agreements, including one establishing a high-level standing commission to oversee bilateral cooperation and others creating formal ties between the respective foreign-service institutes and information ministries.
Another accord authorizes China’s state-owned CNPC oil company and Venezuelan counterpart PdVSA to beginning drafting a contract for joint exploitation of the Junin 4 block in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt.
China’s development bank also pledged to finance 75 percent of the cost of building 20,000 units of low-cost housing in Venezuela, and the two governments signed an agreement in principle to promote Chinese group tours to Venezuela.
On the all-important energy front, Chavez said Venezuela aims to be supplying China with 500,000 barrels per day of oil within a “few years,” and to double that figure at some point between 2011 and 2020.
“We should be at a half-million (bpd) in 2009 and at a million in the following decade,” he said.
Venezuela, the world’s fifth-leading oil exporter, is actively seeking to lessen its dependence on sales to the United States, currently the main customer for the Andean nation’s crude.
In a related matter, Chavez also announced here that his country will increase twofold this winter the amount of heating fuel it provides at a discount to poor households in the U.S. Northeast, building on an initiative launched in the fall of 2005.
“We’re going to do it. We’re going to double the heating-fuel program, beginning in the month of October and principally in November, December, January and February,” the Venezuelan leader said.
He told reporters that CITGO Petroleum, PdVSA’s Houston-based U.S. subsidiary, “already has instructions in this regard.”
CITGO says it sold 40 million gallons (150 million liters) of heating-fuel at reduced prices last winter to more than 181,000 households and hundreds of homeless shelters in the states of Massachusetts, New York, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Some Chavez critics claim the subsidized-fuel program is more about burnishing the Venezuelan leader’s image in the United States than about helping the needy.
