Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) held talks on Sunday with the President of Ghana John Kufour on the second leg of a seven-nation African trip aimed at enhancing China's economic and political influence on the resource-rich continent.
Wen said the two-day trip to the west African country would cement existing close ties between the two nations.
"I am sure this visit will strengthen traditional friendship, enhance vertical mutual trust and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Ghana, thus lifting our bilateral relations to a new height," said Wen in remarks translated from Mandarin after talks with Kufour.
"The Chinese government places high value on enhancing friendship and cooperation with Ghana and will work ... to build on past achievement," Wen said.
In addition to seeking energy suppliers, Wen's trip, the third by a high-profile Chinese leader to Africa over the past six months, is is also seen as aimed at securing markets for its consumer and industrial goods.
Before leaving Egypt where his African tour began, Wen defended China's record in Africa over the past 50 years and stressed that Chinese investment was an opportunity for the continent to achieve a higher level of development.
Ministers from the two countries signed a series of trade and technological deals totalling US$66 million.
Under the agreements, US$4 million each would go for economic and technical cooperation and for exchange of health professionals.
The third agreement of US$30 million is for the establishment of an information communication technology backbone, while the fourth agreement for US$28 million is for the construction of a highway just outside Accra.
In another of the agreements, Chinese doctors are to be dispatched to Ghana to help a country that has lost a significant size of its medical workers to Western countries where salaries are much higher.
China will also help a Ghanaian university set up a distance learning campus.
Wen was scheduled yesterday to inaugurate a 220km long highway linking Accra and Kumasi, a city north of the capital, renovated with an interest-free loan from China.
According to the Xinhua news agency, bilateral trade between China and Ghana has grown 10-fold over the past decade from US$76 million in 1995 to US$760 million last year.
China has leapfrogged Ghana's traditional trading partners India and Britain to become the West African nation's biggest foreign investor in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest Ghanaian official records.
Ghana, which was the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence from its colonial rulers in 1957, established full diplomatic ties with China three years later in 1960.
Wen was scheduled to leave Ghana later yesterday for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The premier is travelling with a high-level delegation that includes Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing (
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