CRI听力:Chinese President Addresses UN Sustainable Development Summit

The Sustainable Development Summit continues into its second day with more than 70 heads of state and government delivering speeches stating their resolution to realize the 2030 development agenda.

Among them, Chinese President Xi Jinping has made his first speech at the UN headquarters. When addressing the summit, he says over the past 30 years and more, China has embarked on a reform and opening up policy, lifting 439 million people out of poverty and making remarkable progress in areas of education, health and women's welfare. And the country has basically realized the Millennium Development Goals. The Chinese President also calls on the international community to redouble their collective efforts to jointly implement the 2030 Agenda.

"All countries should enhance their development capacity, the international environment for development should be improved, the development partnership between rich and poor countries should be optimized, and coordination mechanism for development should be strengthened."

In his speech, President Xi Jinping also highlighted China's active role in international development cooperation. China has provided 166 countries and international organizations with nearly 400 billion yuan worth of assistance and dispatched over 600,000 aid workers. And over 700 of them have laid down their precious lives in aiding the development of other countries.

According to Xi Jinping, China will also establish an assistance fund for South-South cooperation, with an initial pledge of 2 billion US dollars in support of developing countries' implementation of the 2030 development agenda.

In addition to the calls for international community, Xi Jinping says China will continue its effort on the world stage to push forward the Sustainable Development Goals, being listed in the 2030 Agenda.

"China will continue to increase investment in the least developed countries, aiming to increase its total to 12 billion US dollars by 2030. And China will exempt the debt of the outstanding intergovernmental interest-free loans due by the end of 2015 owed by the relevant least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing countries."

On Sep. 25th, the UN General Assembly formally adopted the 2030 Agenda, along with 17 Sustainable Development Goals to guide the development of the international community over the next 15 years.

For CRI, I'm He Fei in New York.