* China's aid policies evolving with experience
* Non-interference in recipients' domestic affairs
* More local labor being used on Chinese projects
By Paul Eckert
UNITED NATIONS, Sept 22 (Reuters) - China's aid policies toward Africa, criticized in the West for overlooking human rights abuses and not creating local jobs, are evolving as once-poor China builds experience helping poorer states, Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming said on Wednesday.
Chen said boosting aid and training and offering debt forgiveness and zero tariff imports from the world's poorest countries was a key Chinese pledge at this week's U.N. summit on the Millennium Development Goals to ease poverty.
The minister, who said he visits six or seven African countries every year, acknowledged that China took a different tack on extending aid to developing countries -- eschewing conditionality and the tough terms demanded by Western donors.
"Some friends from Western countries ask me why China continues to give foreign assistance to some countries with bad human rights records or problematic political regimes," Chen told Reuters in an interview.
"I tell them that the social and cultural systems are different and the development path and political regimes are diversified and there is no one single way," he said.
China, which itself bristles at criticism of its human rights record, has come under fire for what critics call no-strings-attached aid to governments such as those of Sudan and Zimbabwe that are seen as pariahs in the West for how they treat their people.
"We do not attach political conditions to our developmental assistance to other developing countries. We do not interfere with internal affairs when implementing our assistance policies," said Chen.
PROJECTS, NOT CASH GRANTS
Asked how China prevents or minimizes corruption -- a major focus of the conditionality policies imposed by Western donors on aid recipients -- Chen said Chinese aid projects are structured to "avoid our assistance becoming an opportunity for corruption."
"The form of our aid is not grants of money, but specific projects," he said, describing a process in which a facility is built, then local people are trained to manage it for three years before it is handed over to the recipient government.
"Since we have relatively cheap labor and raw materials, we can provide projects at a reasonable price," said Chen.
He said the notion that Chinese projects in Africa use exclusively Chinese labor and do not create local employment was dated and stemmed from a "misunderstanding."
"Now we are increasing the employment of local staff," and the government encourages Chinese firms to hire and train local people, he said.
China's ambitious aid agenda notwithstanding, the country still has 150 million people living below the poverty line, out of a population of 1.3 billion people, he said.
"China's GDP has grown very fast to reach number two in the world in the second quarter of this year. However if we look at GDP per capita, China is still ranked around 100," said Chen.
By Chen's reckoning, "China will remain a developing country for a very long time, maybe for 50-100 years."
"We still have a lot of work to do," he stressed. (Editing by Eric Beech)
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