Chinese Premier Li Qiang met with Malaysia's King Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar in Beijing on Friday.
Li said China and Malaysia are working hand in hand to build a community with a shared future, noting that President Xi Jinping and King Sultan Ibrahim have had in-depth exchanges on continuously deepening China-Malaysia relations and cooperation.
China is willing to work with Malaysia to implement the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, maintain close high-level exchanges, strengthen the alignment of development strategies, deepen exchanges and cooperation in areas including economy, trade, infrastructure and people-to-people exchanges, and achieve more practical results, said Li.
The premier said China stands ready to work with Asian countries including Malaysia to uphold the central position of ASEAN in regional cooperation and to jointly build a peaceful, prosperous, open and integrated Asia.
For his part, King Sultan Ibrahim said the Malaysian side highly appreciates and actively participates in the Belt and Road Initiative, looking forward to further deepening exchanges and cooperation and enhancing constructive dialog with China, and jointly building the South China Sea into a sea of peace, friendship, and cooperation.
Chinese premier meets Malaysia's king in Beijing
Chinese premier meets Malaysia's king in Beijing
With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.
Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.
The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.
In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.
"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.
This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.
In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.
"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.
Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected
