China has been Africa's largest trading partner for nine years in a row as major cooperation programs boosted bilateral trade, official data showed Tuesday.

China-Africa trade has been growing robustly since the launch of 10 major cooperation plans three years ago. In the first half of 2018, bilateral trade rose 16 percent year on year to 98.8 U.S. billion dollars, Qian Keming, vice minister of commerce, told a press conference.

China announced 10 major plans for China-Africa cooperation at the Johannesburg summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2015 and many of them were targeted at economic and trade cooperation.

Qian said all of the economic and trade cooperation plans have so far been implemented and some of them have "yielded very good results."

In the past three years, China's annual average direct investment to Africa stood at around 3 billion dollars, while progress was seen in industrial cooperation in sectors such as manufacturing, finance, tourism, and aviation.

Africa's infrastructure is seeing improvements thanks to these cooperation plans, which are expected to bring the continent 30,000-km of highways, 85-million-tonnes per year of harbor capacity, over 9-million-tonnes per day of water-cleaning capacity and about 20,000-megawatt power generating capacity, together with creating some 900,000 jobs.

The 2018 Beijing summit of FOCAC is slated for Sept. 3 and 4. The summit will be themed "China and Africa: toward an even stronger community with a shared future through win-win cooperation."

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