China will invite 100 Japanese students at Tokyo's Waseda University to visit China, Chinese President Hu Jintao said Thursday.

Hu, on a state visit to Japan, announced the plan while delivering a speech at Waseda University.

Hu Jintao said it would be a part of the ongoing China-Japan Friendly Exchange Year of the Youth, during which both China and Japan will hold a series of activities in various forms with rich contents.

"I hope that students here can join in the exchange project to visit China," Hu said.

"The youth should advance the world's civilization, bring happiness to the human beings and contribute their youthful energy to mankind's prosperity," Hu quoted Waseda alumnus Li Dazhao, China's revolutionary pioneer in the early 20th century, as saying.

"I had been engaged in a job which dealt with the youth affairs for years, and (thus) I have special feelings for the youth," said Hu, who served as a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) and Chairman of the All-China Youth Federation in 1982-1984 and the first secretary of Secretariat of the CYLC Central Committee in 1984-1985.

The young Chinese and Japanese are the fresh force for promoting the friendship between the two countries and are destined to be the ones to create the future for such ties, said the Chinese president.

He recalled his address delivered last June to a Japanese delegation composed of descendants and representatives of the Japanese participants of the largest-ever Japan-China youth gathering in 1984, saying that as time can change people's appearance it can not alter the friendship among people, the seed of friendship sown in the youth time will grow with our whole life.

The president encouraged young people of both countries to make joint efforts to sow the seeds of friendship extensively and pass the banner of friendship on from generation to generation.

In the fall of 1984, 3,000 Japanese young people, at the invitation of the Chinese government, visited China, the largest foreign group China had ever received. The event was described as an unprecedented one in the history of China-Japan friendship.

President Hu is in Japan for a five-day "warm-spring" state visit, the first trip by a Chinese president to the country in a decade.

(Xinhua News Agency May 8, 2008)