Your respected Comrade General Secretary Kim Jong Il,

Dear Korean comrades,

Comrades and friends,

I, on behalf of the party, government and people of China, would like to warmly welcome you Comrade General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK, on a China visit in this beautiful season full of vim and vigor.

Your current visit fully shows that you General Secretary and WPK Central Committee attach great importance to developing the Sino-DPRK friendship. The visit will help deepen strategic understanding, intensify practical cooperation and upgrade friendship and cooperation between the two countries.

Just before, Comrade General Secretary Kim Jong Il and I exchanged views over issues of common concern in a profound way and reached an important agreement.

We have shared the same views with each other as regards steadily promoting mutual strategic understanding through visits of high-ranking officials, intensifying exchange of experience in party and state building, expanding reciprocal cooperation, invigorating exchange in culture, education, sports and other fields and exchange of views over the international and regional situation and other major issues and taking a joint action.

The Chinese party and government have consistently maintained and propelled the Sino-DPRK friendship and cooperation in a far-sighted way and on a strategic level. It is our unshakable policy to consolidate and develop the traditional friendship.

We, together with the Korean comrades, will steadily develop the bilateral friendship and cooperation in the spirit of inheriting tradition, facing up to the future, building good neighborly friendship and strengthening cooperation. In this way, we will work hard to accelerate socialist construction in the two countries, promote interests common to the two sides and defend and promote the peace, stability and prosperity of the region.

The industrious and resourceful Korean people are now working hard to develop the economy, improve the people's living standard and build a thriving nation to mark the 100th birth anniversary of President Kim Il Sung.

We, as a friendly neighbor, comrade and true friend of Korea, sincerely hope that the Korean people, under the leadership of you General Secretary, will attain the targets of various sectors, explore a way of development suitable for the actual conditions of the country and make fresh and greater achievements in the building of a thriving nation.