ASTANA -- A visit to Kazakhstan by China's new President Hu Jintao starting on Monday evening is expected here to help channel China's growing interest in its resource-rich but sparsely populated Central Asian neighbor.

"We will be working with, let's say the new generation team, on priorities for cooperation ... this visit will lay the foundations for cooperation in the nearest future," Kazakh Deputy Foreign Minister Vadim Zverkov said.

That Hu is including Kazakhstan in his first foreign tour since taking over as president from Jiang Zemin reflects the rapid growth in relations with this neighboring former Soviet Republic which broke free from Moscow in 1991.

Bilateral trade has reached almost two billion dollars annually and China is vying with Western and Russian investors for pieces of the oil industry emerging on Kazakhstan's Caspian shelf, the world's major oil discovery of the last decade.

This dynamic will be reflected in a welcoming ceremony on Monday evening led by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and in a tree-planting ceremony in the "avenue of heads of state," one of a number of curiosities which have sprouted recently in Astana, Kazakhstan's new capital on the northern steppe.

Little information has been made publicly available about the subjects to be discussed during this halt in a tour which also takes in Russia, France and Mongolia, but a five-year cooperation plan will be signed before Hu leaves early on Wednesday, Zverkov told AFP.

The development of relations between the two countries has not been entirely smooth, a case in point being Kazakhstan's current ban on cross-border trade with China, intended to keep the killer SARS virus out of Kazakhstan.

The ban has dealt a blow to impoverished residents along the countries' mountainous 1,800-kilometer (1,120-mile) mutual border.

Beijing has not always hit the mark in jousting with the big Caspian oil players such as the United States' Exonmobil Corp.

The China National Petroleum Corp now owns 60 percent of Kazakhstan's CNPC-Aktobemunaigaz oil field, but the sale of a major stake in the mammoth Kashagan Caspian Project to China's offshore oil producer CNOOC was blocked in May by Western shareholders.

Hu's visit could be less significant in terms of concrete agreements than in helping to build trust, which will become increasingly needed as China's growing population and economy start to impinge on its north-western neighbor, Dosym Satpayev, Director of the Almaty-based Arg risk assessment firm, said.

at the moment there are no really "painful topics" between the two countries and they work increasingly well together in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brings together China and five ex-Soviet countries led by Russia, Saypayev said.

But a major issue on the horizon is the sharing of water resources from rivers criss-crossing the Chinese-kazakh border. And in the longer term the growth of a Chinese Diaspora in Kazakhstan "will bring problems," Satpayev predicted.

Chinese settlers in Kazakhstan "will be used by China as a lever of influence," Satpayev said.

Although it is a fraction of China's size, Kazakhstan has a population of just 16 million on a territory roughly the size of Western Europe.