ASTANA - Visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev agreed at a meeting on Saturday to strengthen bilateral ties.

During the talks, the two leaders summed up the development of China-Kazakhstan partnership, charted a future course for cooperation and reached extensive consensus on deepening their comprehensive strategic partnership.

Calling China-Kazakhstan ties as an example of neighborliness and mutually beneficial cooperation, Xi said China is happy to see a stable, strong and prosperous Kazakhstan.

China supports Kazakhstan to choose a development path in accordance with its own reality, maintain national sovereignty, promote economic and social development and play a constructive role in international and regional affairs, Xi said.

For his part, Nazarbayev said Kazakhstan will always be China's good neighbor, friend and brother, and Kazakhstan is willing to stride forward together with China.

He noted that Xi's visit carries on the tradition of close contact between the two countries' leaders and shows a high degree of trust, mutual support and sincere cooperation.

At the meeting, both leaders agreed that mutual support of each other's core interests and issues of major concern is the essence of the China-Kazakhstan comprehensive strategic partnership.

They said China-Kazakhstan energy cooperation is complementary and mutually beneficial, and both countries are long, stable and reliable energy cooperation partners.

The two leaders pointed out that China and Kazakhstan have the potential for future cooperation in more extensive fields. Both sides should improve their two-way trade structure, stimulate trade diversification, improve cooperation scale and quality, so as to achieve a trade volume of 40 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

They also agreed the "three evil forces" and organized cross-border crimes are the common threats of the two countries and the region, and have to be harshly cracked down.

After the meeting, the two leaders signed a joint declaration on further deepening the comprehensive strategic partnership and witnessed the signing of a package of cooperation documents.

Xi arrived here on Friday for his first state visit to Kazakhstan after attending a Group of 20 summit in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.