A senior official with the World Bank (WB) Thursday pledged that WB will render more support to China in economic, educational and scientific fields.

Yukon Huang, country director of the World Bank's China Program, said that WB and the Chinese government have forged close and fruitful cooperative relations over the past two decades. WB has supported China's more than 220 projects with 35 billion US dollars involved.

"China today is totally different from what it was 20 years ago, " Huang said, adding that ten years ago, WB's support to China was mainly focused on providing loans and now the support has become more "diversified".

WB's future strategy in China is based on China's macro- economic policies,Huang stressed.

WB will concentrate more on the transfer of knowledge, including providing policy consultations to the Chinese government, he said.

WB's lending will focus more on infrastructure construction in central and western China, as well as construction of urban facilities and environmental protection programs in the eastern areas.

Huang predicts that WB will lend five to seven billion US dollars to China in the following three years, with at least one billion US dollars of the loans to be used to back major projects in the west.

Until now, more than one hundred projects with WB capital involved have been carried out in China's western provinces.

(Xinhua 11/02/2000)