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Speech by Mans Lonnroth

2005-11-20author:李瑞source:

  Thank you, Minister Xie.

  Ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues,

  I would just make two small short comments. First, I'd like to thank the Secretariat for the site visits that has been organized to Weihai and Tianjin during 3 days. We were 3 Council Members and 3 Task Force chairmen. And we had very valuable and informative study of both the challenges of urbanization and also the determination the Chinese leadership. We would have the 4th Council member, if Svend Auken had not to stay back to Denmark to fight the government in the local elections. And we were very happy to tell every one that his party won. I am saying this because I think I recommend all Council Members to participate in the site visit. They are very valuable to learn more about China. And I put great value on them. So penciling them for the next year's China Council. Now I'd like to say something about the topic of today. It's enormous topic and I would like to summarize it by saying one, two, four and more than 200 million. One, two, four and more than 200 million. And what do I mean by that? Well, Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan mentioned that at the China's policy is that the GDP of China in the year 2010 should be twice that of the year 2000 and the GDP of China in 2020 should be 4 times that of year 2000. So that is the reason for one, two, four. And why the 200 million plus? Because the one, two, four means more than 200 million people from rural areas to cities. More than 200 million people in 20 years or in 15 years that are left in fact. And this is as Mrs. Mona Sahlin mentioned, this is equivalent of building a city, or the size of a city of Stockholm of 1.2 million. Every month, 12 months a year, during 15 years. Every month, 12 months a year, during 15 years. It's enormous challenge. And we all know what development challenges actually mean. The pressures are enormous on construction, housing, transportation, waste water, whatever. Every industry, every sector, every ministry we rush to force its own development plans. And in such situations we also know by experience that, protection of environment and protection of culture heritage will always be somewhat left behind when the development pressures are very very strong and very very heavy. So in order to have a reasonable balance between the needs for development on the one hand, and the needs to protect cultural and natural heritage, on the other hand, that has to be a very strong degree of coordination, and a very strong both monitoring and attention and vigilance from the top down, from the political leaders and this is on both the national level, the provincial levels and on the local levels. We will hear more about this during this coming 3 days and what I would listen especially carefully to is just how this need for coordination is going to be addressed. Thank you!



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