Chinese FM on Efforts Needed in Globalization Process

To promote long-term development and prosperity, Asian nations need to make efforts to take advantage of the favorable factors of economic globalization while avoiding the unfavorable ones, Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan said Friday in Bangkok.

At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its 10 dialogue partners meeting (ASEAN+10), Tang said it is important for the Asian nations to take an active part in the economic globalization, and to adapt to the international environment of economic globalization.

In this sense, he stressed, the Asian countries should give full consideration to their own national conditions, development levels and comparative advantages while pressing forward readjustment and reform, upgrading industrial structures, promoting scientific and technological advances. By so doing, they would be able to steadily increase their aggregate national strength, competitiveness and the capacity to protect themselves from risks.

The Asian nations have learned an important revelation from the financial crisis, that is, to gradually expand regional economic cooperation, he added.

Countries in the region should strengthen their cooperation in finance, trade, investment and technology on the basis of equality and mutual benefit so as to take advantage of each other's strengths and attain common development, he said, stressing "This is an important way for countries in the region to meet the challenges of globalization."

Tang said countries should share the benefit of globalization which, he believed, should be a process "leading to the common prosperity of the South and North, rather than one of polarization of the world."

In view of the growing accumulation of wealth by a few countries or interest groups and the widening gap between the rich and the poor in the world as a whole, Tang appealed to the developed nations to fulfill their duties and obligations, further open their markets to the developing countries, offer them financial assistance, and work with them in the reform and improvement of international financial structure and rules, and " establish a just and reasonable new international economic order."

Finally, he asked for the democratization of international relations. In the age of globalization, he said, different cultural traditions, lifestyles, social systems and values of nations should be respected and "the principles of sovereign equality and noninterference in other countries' internal affairs maintained."

He insisted that to impose a certain system, value or development model on other countries does not represent the progress of history. "On the contrary," he said, "it will only aggravate injustice and inequality that may occur in the process of globalization."



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