China Successful on "Environmental Diplomacy"China's environmental diplomacy, as a special field of diplomatic activity, has made great achievement in recent years under the guidance of the diplomatic thought of Deng Xiaoping.Xie Zhenhua, Minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said that with the environmental problem becoming a hot topic of conversation in the world since the beginning of the 1990s, "environmental diplomacy" has gradually become a new concept. To date, in addition to its accession to the" Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer" and some other international conventions, China has so far signed environmental cooperation agreements and memos as well as 15 environmental cooperation agreements on nuclear safety and radiation with more than 30 countries. The cooperation between China and the UN Development Program, World Bank, Asia Development Bank, Global Environment Fund and other institutions has also achieved big progress. Through these activities of environmental diplomacy, China has played an important role in the field of international environmental protection and international environmental cooperation. He said that in the future China will put one of the focuses of its environmental diplomacy on actively introducing mature technology, management methods and experience of policy from the developed countries and making them serve China; meanwhile, we should continue to import international capital to serve our environmental protection. Statistics show that by the end of 1998, the foreign loan used in importing environmental protection projects had amounted to US$3.34 billion and grants to US$0.42 billion, which accounted for 4 percent and 14 percent of China's total foreign loans grants respectively. Xie pointed out that the Chinese Government would carefully study and appropriately react to the new problems concerning the environment and arising in the course of globalization. |
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