Hello, welcome to visit Shanghai Forum
I am very grateful to the organizers ofShanghai Forum for inviting me to attend this grand event. Over the years ofcontinuous development, Shanghai Forum grows bigger and bigger and enables usto have the opportunity to share insights together every year in the city. I amvery honored to have such an opportunity to exchange ideas with everybody here.This is my first visit to Shanghai since I ended my ten-year presidential term.I am very pleased to be here to see my Chinese friends. Thank you very much foryour kindness and friendliness to Indonesia.
First of all I want to say that thebilateral relation between Indonesia and China is solid and durable. And thefriendly cooperative partnership between us is deepening. Historically,bilateral relations have had experienced ups and downs, but since 2005, thefirst year I started my first presidential term, the bilateral ties haveentered a new era- we established a strategic cooperative partnership. Afterthat, we continued strengthening and expanding our partnership. I believe thatour new president JOKO WIDODO is also committed to keeping strengthening thefriendly relations between our two countries.
The theme of this forum is about economicglobalization and Asian choice, and the subtitle is interconnection andinnovation. These themes come at the right time for us. Asia economy is on thetrack of continuous development, and the economic globalization is deepening.In this context we hold such a forum to observe the latest trends in Asia. Welook forward to a better, sustainable development in the region, and theestablishment of a Common Destiny of Communities that would ensure that Asia -an engine of global economic growth - will play a positive role to in globaleconomy in the long term.
Before we discuss the problems andchallenges Asia faces, I would like to tell you about my vision of globaldevelopments. I think 2016 is a year full of challenges for all the countries,we will find large turmoil of global geopolitics and economies this year, andthe fallouts will ripple through far beyond. Only when our cooperation is basedon strategic mutual trust, can we continue on the road of development. Securityissues need to be further addressed throughout the region. New challenges willemerge one after one. However, we can still create new opportunities whilefacing such challenges. I believe that many Asian countries, including thePhilippines, Japan, South Korea, and even Australia, will continue making theirown contributions to the course.
Compared to last year, our economy has beenrecovering. But this year, we can also see the IMF's dim outlook of the worldeconomy, where the IMF deems the time of overall economic slowdown is too longthat would result in new challenges. It said the global economy could only makea 3.2% growth, and the new normal becomes constantly grilled across the board.In this context, the new challenges mean that our unemployment rate would keephigh, economic growth would be still depressed, and in many regions the growthcould be less than 1%. In the economic development, we often encounter factorsimpacting sustainable development.
Of course, many of the ASEAN countries willmaintain high growth that could reach 4.7%. And economies in some countries,including Burma and Vietnam, may grow faster than the pace of six other ASEANcountries. But, in the process of the economic development, we can also see howdifficult it is to make a decision during which we may additionally encounterlots of uncertain factors emerging in front of us. For example, we need toconsider whether China’s economy could maintain high growth, while I of coursebelieve that China's economy will still continue developing. We are also veryconcerned about other issues, for example, which candidates will eventually winthis year's US presidential election, can we make progress in fighting againstISIS, and what trends would terrorism develop. So for us, there will be a lotof things that are out of our expectation. Any developments could changerapidly. These uncertain factors could cause a very big challenge throughoutthe entire region. In this context, for the Asian countries, we must understandtheir current situation, and we hope our young people and our universities tomake more thoughts on these issues.
We hope that more and more people can befrom a strategic level to discuss Asia's political and economic development inthe future. And at the same time, we also hope that people from generation togeneration can know our times better and grasp developments happened in ourera. In fact, for us, there are a lot of forces that can develop and shake upAsia. First, we believe, we should take economic development as one of our coremissions, and the whole society should also take it as a cohesive force forfurther development. In addition, we should not only need to make contributionsand improvements politically and economically, but also make breakthroughs interms of our thoughts.
We can see that development of cities andeconomies are closely linked to growth of income. According to the AsianDevelopment Bank, it is expected by 2025 there will be additionally 30 billionpeople who will immigrate to cities; this is a new trend in urbanization. Wecan see that now in Latin America, and some other developing countries, therewill be a great number of poverty population immigrating into cities. That isto say, we need to work helping the three billion poor people out of povertyafter they come into cities. I believe that in Asia, there will be more andmore entrepreneurs to emerge in the future. In this hall, we can also see asteady increase in the number of entrepreneurs who I believe will continue topromote development of the society as a whole. I believe entrepreneurship is avery important driving force to push for development of the whole society, helpus resolve risks, so that we can do more things and input more resources tohelp innovations. We need to continue encouraging faster development of thewhole society during our putting focus on innovation, and it is especially sofor China.
President Xi had said that in the economicnew normal, one of the very important pillars is innovation. And he talkedabout that if we can effectively use innovative thinking, we will be able toplay out our advantage of human resources to a greater extent. For Indonesia,during the whole 10 golden years, we also placed innovation as our mostimportant priority. Innovation can lay a solid foundation for the future, andcan make more harmonious and speedy development. As long as theentrepreneurship can continue promoting innovations, it can make naturalresources be more wisely used. During the economic development, socialinclusion should be encouraged and environmental protection should be carriedout in sync with economic development. They are also foundation for green andsustainable development.
We strongly agree with the idea ofdevelopment with environmental protection and inclusiveness. In the productionprocess, we should encourage lower costs, and faster and more environmentallyfriendly approaches. At the same time, China has so many ambitiousentrepreneurs who can not only help improve living standards of thecommunities, but also enhance equality of the whole society. I believe thatentrepreneurship has become the most important force in driving development inAsia. Another important development driving force is connectivity. In the 20thcentury, what countries cared most is their sovereignty; but in the 21stcentury, we care more about interconnection, interworking and interoperability.We always need to think about how far we made in our interconnection and interworkingwith the outside world. We need interconnection with global markets, withothers’ ideas, and with others’ infrastructure. So I have to emphasize thepower of interconnection is very crucial.
In my country, poverty people not onlylacks of economic means, but also feel very isolated and helpless, renderingthem having to accept their miserable fate. But interconnection can help themchange their fate. For a poor man, they are now given more power to change.They can contact others quite smoothly, because they can use social networkingtools and email. Through the digitalization, the poor will have more ability toreach the rest of the world. Many young people in the Middle East are inpoverty and out of job, so during the "Arab Spring" unrest, they becamethe first batch of a lost generation. In the development of the whole regionaleconomy, it needs a common participation of Asian countries, so that we canbecome stronger and improve the Asian economies as a whole.
I had been thinking the spirit of nationalismwhen I served as president of Indonesia. If a country is eager for sounddevelopment, it is necessary to break shackles of nationalism, and should bemore inclusive and extensional to much wider regions. We cannot even clinch toregionalism; we should not put our focus just on Asia, because we cannotisolate ourselves in Asia. We should promote strategic cooperation with otherregions, including with the European Union.
The developments in Southeast Asia shows alittle better, the ASEAN member countries have been expanded from five to tenthroughout the Southeast Asia. The participating member countries of ASEAN havebecome a community of destiny, whether it is judged from the aspects of thenation's destiny, the national awareness, and identity and other aspects, ithas already had quite a high degree of consensus. ASEAN countries mustestablish more security measures, and contribute more for integration andinterconnection with the rest of the world. In China’s "Belt andRoad" initiative, Southeast Asia will benefit, which also requires theASEAN countries to enhance their construction, and strengthen stability of theregional economy. Healthy growth throughout the region will be conducive to thehealthy development of the world economy, and plays out a farreachingsignificance as a world economy booster.
In this forum, I would like to appeal forfurther strengthening the integration of regions.
First, in the Asian region, we muststrengthen cooperation and create a community of common destiny throughoutAsia. At the same time, we also hope that the whole Asia, including the ASEAN,can move further towards stability and security. In the new era of the 21stcentury, we need to make full preparations to cope with challenges in terms ofthoughts, actions, and the economic and political means. We sure will encounternew problems and challenges ahead, and we are confident we can solve theseproblems - as long as we can change our mindset, and use of the thinking ofcooperation, we can achieve a joint solution to address the problems andchallenges.
Second, we must further strengthen thecooperation basis and cooperation infrastructure, in particular to establish aconsensus of Common Destiny of Communities among all stakeholders. We mustcontinue to focus on the same old issues, that is, how to establish a mutualtrust, mutual understanding, communication and interconnection mechanism, so tobring different development tracks of different countries onto the samefoundations of strategic trust and cooperation. Such cooperation and growthmust be based on dialogue and exchange mechanisms that have been carried outfruitfully. And stable mutual respect should also become an important basis forus to solve future problems. There are many countries which are more advancedin mobilizing assets and in mental preparation than other countries, and weneed to continue to strengthen balanced and coordinated development in thisregard.
Third, we must build higherself-confidence, believing our strength can continue to solve potentialchallenges. I have shared with you my vision of the future of Asia, that is,the future of Asia would certainly be better than now. I am optimistic that thefuture of Asia will continue to success and prosperity, and continue to move towardspeace. However, this future would not easily come by just with our fingertips,we must continue to strengthen cooperation and regional integration; we mustcontinuously contribute our efforts and hard works. If you do not strengthenregional integration, it is likely we would lose the going-forward momentum forwhich we have got lots of failure cases and examples, and this prognosis mightcome true in the short term, and we are likely to make the achievements we haveachieved go down the drain. We need keep our long-lasting fights and maintainour high-spirited will, and we should rely on our continued integration work topush Asia to make real and sustainable development in the global competition.
So I here finally would like tore-emphasize that we must strengthen cooperation, join hands to consolidateregional integration in Asia and build a solid foundation for the future.
Thank you all!
(This article is edited based on the recording and has not been reviewed by the speaker.)
