It is a great honour for me to speak at one of China&rsquos great academic institutions one that is helping to revive and maintain your country&rsquos h ...
However, that need not be the path taken, either in this country or in the rest of the world. Both for your national interests and in the interest of the world as a whole, you have a great responsibility to look after your people, and your natural environment.
But your responsibility does not end there.
The eighth and last Millennium Development Goal is a global partnership for development. This means that developing countries must not be left to develop on their own. They need the help of the richer and more powerful countries through the removal of unfair trade barriers and subsidised competition; through the elimination of the debts which oblige so many poor countries to spend more on repaying and servicing their creditors than they can on the social needs of their own people; and through more generous official development aid which the rich countries have repeatedly promised to provide.In practical terms, global partnership means that every country where there is extreme poverty is entitled to expect help in forging and pursuing a national strategy to achieve the MDGs by 2015. For the poorest countries, most of which are in Africa, this will be of decisive importance. Without it, they will not reach the Goals. With it, they are in with a real chance.
That places a big responsibility on the rich countries and it is one that China shares. I know you are used to thinking of your country as a developing one, and so it is probably the fastest developing country the world has ever seen. But the more successfully it develops, the more it too will be expected to show solidarity with smaller and poorer countries that still need a helping hand.
By the same token, as China’s geopolitical weight grows, so does its share of responsibility for world security.
As well as global solidarity, the Millennium Declaration expressed a shared vision of collective security, rooted in the United Nations Charter.
Yet the events of the past two years have called that consensus in question.
Some have doubted whether Article 51 of the Charter, which reaffirms the inherent right of self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security, is still sufficient in an age when an armed attack may come without warning, from a clandestine terrorist group, perhaps armed with weapons of mass destruction.
They have argued that force must sometimes be used preventively, and that they must be free to decide when their national security requires it.
Others have replied that that doctrine is in itself a grave threat to international peace and security since it might imply that any state has the right to use force whenever it sees fit, without regard to other states’ concerns. And that is precisely the state of affairs which the United Nations was created to save humanity from.
