East China's coastal Fujian Province will speed up investment in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries to accelerate its economic growth, said an official of the Fujian provincial government Monday.

"We encourage local enterprises, especially the booming non-state-owned enterprises, to invest in and cooperate with the ASEAN countries in the fields of manufacturing and resource exploitation," said Wang Meixiang, vice-governor of Fujian.

The ninth China-ASEAN Senior Officials' Consultation started Monday in the Fujian scenic spot, Wuyishan City, and Wang didn't miss the chance to advertise her province to the delegates.

"Fujian Province and the ASEAN countries are highly mutually complementary in many aspects, including natural resources, industrial structure and agricultural products, so the potential for cooperation is great," she said.

She said Fujian enjoys many advantages in cooperating with the ASEAN nations.

"Fujian is the ancestral home of a large number of overseas Chinese, and it is close to the ASEAN countries geographically," she said.

China and ASEAN have agreed to construct in 10 years the world's largest free trade area, the China-ASEAN free trade area, which will also bring opportunities for Fujian, she said.

"We've laid down a development program to accelerate capital and commercial exchanges as well as other economic and technological cooperation between Fujian and the ASEAN nations so as to boost our local companies and increase their market shares in the southeast Asian countries," said Wang.

By the end of 2002, enterprises from Fujian had invested in 26 projects in the ASEAN countries with a contract value of 12.78 million US dollars. Fujian's imports from ASEAN increased 36 percent year-on-year in 2002 to 1.34 billion US dollars.

So far Fujian Province has begun building manufacturing and trade zones in Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam.

"We'll speed up the construction of those manufacturing and trade zones and encourage the export of relevant equipment, technology and workforce," Wang said.

Statistics showed that the trade volume between Fujian Province and the ASEAN countries reached 1.36 billion US dollars in the first half year of 2003, up 19.05 percent year-on-year.

(Xinhua News Agency August 19, 2003)