Documentation Brochure - Hamburg Summit

China's Future Role in Asia
Two countries stand for all Asia’s
resounding progress towards a new
era. China is the model, but India too
has now set out on the path that China
has successfully taken for two decades.
Lee Kuan Yew again addressed the
Hamburg Summit’s participants by
satellite link. The founder of modern
Singapore is convinced that the Chinese
economy will continue to grow rapidly:
“I think they can carry on at 8 % for the
next years, and India is growing at
about 70 % of China’s rate. East Asia
will be the fastest growing region in the
world.”
Lee, Prime Minister of Singapore
from 1959 to 1990, vividly recalled the
beginnings of the Chinese economic
miracle. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping visited
Singapore and Hong Kong. “He had not
expected to see cities that were more
modern than Beijing and Shanghai,” Lee
said. In December that year the Beijing
authorities decided to open up the
country that had until then been sealed
off from the rest of the world.
Nearly one million Chinese tourists a
year now visit Singapore, and “everybody
is learning Chinese to do business,” Lee
mentioned. Singapore had already
invested heavily in China, “so we asked
our businessmen to invest in Vietnam
and other countries,” the still influential
elder statesman said. It was a matter of
not putting “all eggs in one basket“.
China’s enormous social problems
and environmental pollution will not
impede its growing influence on a
permanent basis, Lee is convinced. “The
new leaders who took office two years
ago previously served in poor regions.
They are shifting the emphasis from the
coast to the west and northwest.” And
they would eventually solve the problems.
“It will take a long time, it is
costly but they will spend on it,” Lee
said.
Whatever happens, Beijing would
become a rich city exerting a great
attraction on all Asia, and the 2008
Olympic Games would make a major
contribution toward this. They are
planned as “green Games” and Lee said
with a wink that China will keep this
promise. In 1999, to mark the People’s
Republic’s 50th anniversary, the sky
over Beijing was to be blue. So Factories
were shut down for two weeks. “For the
Olympics they will shut them down for
three weeks,” Lee forecasted with a
laugh.