The third International Forum of the Belt and Road Initiative ended this Wednesday in Beijing with trade agreements worth 97.2 billion dollars, announced Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Wang declared at a press conference that the forum was "a complete success" as "all the issues on the agenda" were addressed, which showed the representatives of the 110 countries present that "they didn't come to talk for the sake of talking".

The minister also said that China is committed to building an "open global economy" and developing a "digital economy with a non-discriminatory environment".

According to the head of Chinese diplomacy, the Forum also ended with 458 agreements and more than 100,000 training opportunities.

Xi Jinping, President of China, said that the country will further open up "cross-border trade and investment in services and expand market access for digital products" and reform state-owned enterprises and groups active in the digital economy, intellectual property rights and public procurement.

On the sidelines of the summit, the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Taliban government of Afghanistan admitted to closer economic cooperation with China.

"We will have discussions about investments and maintaining good bilateral relations with China," said Nooruddin Azizi, who is also involved in negotiations to make Afghanistan an official participant in the summit.

Since the withdrawal of US forces from the country in August 2021, the Taliban government has not been recognized by any country.

However, Kabul maintains diplomatic ties with Beijing, which invited Azizi to take part in the summit.

"China is more interested in Afghanistan's development than any other country. We are happy with our relations with China," Azizi stressed.

Since taking power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed various restrictions on women, preventing them from accessing secondary and higher education, as well as countless jobs.

Beijing feared that the Islamist country could become a place of refuge for separatists from the Uighur minority in the region bordering Xinjiang.

Faced with this fear, the Taliban government promised that the country would not become a base for separatist militants and, in return, China offered economic support and investment for the country's reconstruction.

According to data from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the initiative has launched more than 3,000 projects in the last decade, with a combined investment of around one billion dollars, and has created 420,000 jobs.

Designated by Chinese President Xi Jinping as the "project of the century" in 2013, the initiative was initially presented in Kazakhstan as a new economic corridor for Eurasia, inspired by the ancient Silk Road. The construction of ports, railway lines or highways would reconnect East Asia and Europe via Central Asia.

But the initiative has since become Xi Jinping's main foreign policy program. In the last decade, more than 150 countries around the world have joined the Belt and Road.

According to a study carried out by AidData, a research unit on international financing based in the United States, in the first five years since its launch (2013-2017), China financed an average of 83.5 billion dollars a year in development projects abroad, cementing its lead as the main international financier. The net increase, of 31.3 billion dollars a year compared to the previous five years (2008-2012), is equivalent to the average annual funding of the United States, in second place, in the period 2013-2017.