Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great honour for me to speak at one of China’s great academic institutions one that is helping to revive and maintain your country’s historic tradition of leading the world in science and technology, and one whose alumni are to be found in positions of leadership throughout the country.
Here, as in so many other places in China, no visitor can help feeling the excitement of a great country developing at breakneck speed, and every day opening up new vistas of knowledge and opportunity to its citizens. You can be really proud of your country and what it has achieved in the last 25 years.
As I look out over the young faces in this audience I cannot help envying the international students more than a thousand, I am told, from over 50 countries who have the privilege of sharing your learning experience here.
It reminds me for a moment of my own student days, when my country, Ghana, was newly independent. We felt we were suddenly reaching out to the world, and making new discoveries every day.
But then I also remember that times of rapid change can bring pain and confusion, even destruction, as well as progress and excitement.
The more rapid and exciting it is, the more change calls for careful management, and wise, humane leadership.
Order and stability have to be preserved, but without choking off the freedom to enquire, and experiment, and express oneself, since as you young researchers know better than anyone knowledge and science have a vital role in national development.
And technical expertise needs to be harnessed to the development and security of society as a whole, so that it not only creates greater wealth for the few, but enables all citizens to feel safer and more prosperous.
The development of such a great country as China cannot happen in isolation. It affects the whole world, and it draws you into new relationships with other parts of the world. Increasingly, your economy depends on exchanges with other countries both imports and exports, of both goods and capital. Foreign investment plays an essential role in your growth, while your holdings of foreign currencies and your management of your own currency are coming to play a vital part in the international monetary system.
This means that you have a stake in the development and prosperity of the wider world. And your security, too, depends on international peace and stability.
Your government shows that it understands this, by the role that it plays in the United Nations, and elsewhere. And increasingly, Chinese citizens are called on to take risks, and make sacrifices, in the interests of global security. It was impressive to see, in our newspapers the other day, pictures of Chinese policemen in blue helmets preparing to join the United Nations mission in Haiti an island buffeted by both human and meteorological storms, which is literally on the far side of the world from here.
So I am here, in part, to express the world’s gratitude. Clearly you in China have understood, as your saying goes, that we all share the same breath. Human misery knows no frontiers, and nor should human solidarity.
Indeed, solidarity was one of the fundamental values solemnly reaffirmed, four years ago, by the political leaders from all over the world who met at United Nations Headquarters, and issued the Millennium Declaration.
They declared that global challenges must be managed in a way that distributes the costs and burdens fairly…Those who suffer or who benefit least deserve help from those who benefit most.
They promised to spare no effort to free more than one billion of their fellow men, women and children from extreme poverty, and to make the right to development a reality for all.
And they set themselves precise benchmarks by which their success in keeping these promises could be measured, in the year 2015.Those benchmarks have come to be known as the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs. First among them is the pledge to reduce by half the proportion of people in the world living on an income of less than one dollar a day. Others include the pledge to halt, and begin to reverse, the spread of HIV/AIDS; and the pledge to integrate the principles of sustainable development into every country’s policies and programmes, so that our children and grandchildren will not face the threat of living on a planet irredeemably spoilt by human activities, or whose resources are not sufficient for their needs.
Will the world reach these goals by 2015? It depends, in great part, on China.
Your population is so large, and your economy is growing so rapidly, that your impact on all global statistics is enormous. It is theoretically possible that we might succeed in halving the proportion of very poor people in the world by 2015, simply because China had succeeded in lifting almost all its people out of that category, even if most countries in Africa still had the same proportion.
Conversely, many countries might, by 2015, have made great strides in combating HIV/AIDS, or adopting sustainable models of development. But if China had failed to do those things, there would still be terrible consequences for humanity.
