pd06jy98 The President's Radio Address...

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Pages 1243-1309
 
Week Ending Friday, July 3, 1998
 
Exchange With Reporters at the Great Wall in Mutianyu, China

June 28, 1998

Visit to the Great Wall

    Q. What are your impressions of the wall, Mr. President?
    The President. Quite unbelievable. It's amazing to imagine that it 
was done so long ago. They've even had bricks here for 400 and some odd 
years.
    Q. Do you see any analogies, sir, to the way China is now and the 
way it was then?
    The President. No. [Laughter] I said yesterday that I felt--I 
believe this wall now is a symbol that China shows to the rest of the 
world, not a wall to keep people out. It sort of unifies the country for 
over 7,000 kilometers.

Visit to Chongwenmen Church

    Q. Mr. President, could you tell us what the woman in the church 
wanted to talk to you about today?
    The President. She just kept saying how happy she was I was in the 
church and how she wished I could come to the little village where she 
was from. She was very emotional. But as nearly as I can tell, there was 
nothing specific that she was saying. She kept thanking me for being 
there and saying that she was glad I was there, and she wished I could 
come to her village, her home village.

Visit to the Great Wall

    Q. What do you think, Mrs. Clinton? What are your impressions?
    Mrs. Clinton. Magnificent.
    The President. You know, the part--the steep incline you see up 
there, we were told, is the steepest part of the wall. So if we had a 
couple of hours, we could walk 10 kilometers, and we'd hit the biggest 
incline, and we'd all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we'd be 
finished. [Laughter]
    Q. Was it a good workout anyway?
    The President. It was a good workout. It was great.
    Nice cap, Peter [Peter Maer, NBC Mutual Radio].
    Q. Thank you, sir.

Note: The exchange began at 2:45 p.m. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of this exchange.


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[Page 1255-1265]
 
Monday, July 6, 1998
 
Volume 34--Number 27
Pages 1243-1309
 
Week Ending Friday, July 3, 1998
 
Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With Students at Beijing 
University in Beijing, China

June 29, 1998

    The President. Thank you. Thank you, President Chen, Chairman Ren, 
Vice President Chi, Vice Minister Wei. We are delighted to be here today 
with a very large American delegation, including the First Lady and our 
daughter, who is a student at Stanford, one of the schools with which 
Beijing University has a relationship. We have six Members of the United 
States Congress; the Secretary of State; Secretary of Commerce; the 
Secretary of Agriculture; the Chairman of our Council of Economic 
Advisers; Senator Sasser, our Ambassador; the National Security Adviser; 
and my Chief of Staff, among others. I say that to illustrate the 
importance that the United States places on our relationship with China.
    I would like to begin by congratulating all of you, the students, 
the faculty, the administrators, on celebrating the centennial year of 
your university. Gongxi, ``Beida''.
    As I'm sure all of you know, this campus was once home to Yenching 
University which was founded by American missionaries. Many of its 
wonderful buildings were designed by an American architect. Thousands of 
American students and professors have come here to study and teach. We 
feel a special kinship with you.
    I am, however, grateful that this day is different in one important 
respect from another important occasion 79 years ago. In June of 1919, 
the first president of Yenching University, John Leighton Stuart, was 
set to deliver the very first commencement address on these very 
grounds. At the appointed hour, he appeared, but no students appeared. 
They were all out leading the May 4th Movement for China's political and 
cultural renewal. When I read this, I hoped that when I walked into the 
auditorium today, someone would be sitting here. And I thank you for 
being here, very much.

[[Page 1256]]

    Over the last 100 years, this university has grown to more than 
20,000 students. Your graduates are spread throughout China and around 
the world. You have built the largest university library in all of Asia. 
Last year 20 percent of your graduates went abroad to study, including 
half of your math and science majors. And in this anniversary year, more 
than a million people in China, Asia, and beyond have logged on to your 
Web site. At the dawn of a new century, this university is leading China 
into the future.
    I come here today to talk to you, the next generation of China's 
leaders, about the critical importance to your future of building a 
strong partnership between China and the United States.
    The American people deeply admire China for its thousands of years 
of contributions to culture and religion, to philosophy and the arts, to 
science and technology. We remember well our strong partnership in World 
War II. Now we see China at a moment in history when your glorious past 
is matched by your present sweeping transformation and the even greater 
promise of your future.
    Just three decades ago, China was virtually shut off from the world. 
Now, China is a member of more than 1,000 international organizations, 
enterprises that affect everything from air travel to agricultural 
development. You have opened your nation to trade and investment on a 
large scale. Today, 40,000 young Chinese study in the United States, 
with hundreds of thousands more learning in Asia, Africa, Europe, and 
Latin America.
    Your social and economic transformation has been even more 
remarkable, moving from a closed command economic system to a driving, 
increasingly market-based and driven economy, generating two decades of 
unprecedented growth, giving people greater freedom to travel within and 
outside China, to vote in village elections, to own a home, choose a 
job, attend a better school. As a result, you have lifted literally 
hundreds of millions of people from poverty. Per capita income has more 
than doubled in the last decade. Most Chinese people are leading lives 
they could not have imagined just 20 years ago.
    Of course, these changes have also brought disruptions in settled 
patterns of life and work and have imposed enormous strains on your 
environment. Once every urban Chinese was guaranteed employment in a 
state enterprise. Now you must compete in a job market. Once a Chinese 
worker had only to meet the demands of a central planner in Beijing. Now 
the global economy means all must match the quality and creativity of 
the rest of the world. For those who lack the right training and skills 
and support, this new world can be daunting.
    In the short term, good, hardworking people--some, at least, will 
find themselves unemployed. And as all of you can see, there have been 
enormous environmental and economic and health care costs to the 
development pattern and the energy use pattern of the last 20 years, 
from air pollution to deforestation to acid rain and water shortage.
    In the face of these challenges, new systems of training and social 
security will have to be devised, and new environmental policies and 
technologies will have to be introduced with the goal of growing your 
economy while improving the environment. Everything I know about the 
intelligence, the ingenuity, the enterprise of the Chinese people and 
everything I have heard these last few days in my discussions with 
President Jiang, Prime Minister Zhu, and others give me confidence that 
you will succeed.
    As you build a new China, America wants to build a new relationship 
with you. We want China to be successful, secure, and open, working with 
us for a more peaceful and prosperous world. I know there are those in 
China and the United States who question whether closer relations 
between our countries is a good thing. But everything all of us know 
about the way the world is changing and the challenges your generation 
will face tell us that our two nations will be far better off working 
together than apart.
    The late Deng Xiaoping counseled us to seek truth from facts. At the 
dawn of the new century, the facts are clear. The distance between our 
two nations, indeed between any nations, is shrinking. Where once an 
American clipper ship took months to cross from China to the United 
States, today, technology has made us all virtual neighbors.

[[Page 1257]]

From laptops to lasers, from microchips to megabytes, an information 
revolution is lighting the landscape of human knowledge, bringing us all 
closer together. Ideas, information, and money cross the planet at the 
stroke of a computer key, bringing with them extraordinary opportunities 
to create wealth, to prevent and conquer disease, to foster greater 
understanding among peoples of different histories and different 
cultures.
    But we also know that this greater openness and faster change mean 
that problems which start beyond one nation's borders can quickly move 
inside them: the spread of weapons of mass destruction; the threats of 
organized crime and drug trafficking, of environmental degradation, and 
severe economic dislocation. No nation can isolate itself from these 
problems, and no nation can solve them alone. We, especially the younger 
generations of China and the United States, must make common cause of 
our common challenges, so that we can, together, shape a new century of 
brilliant possibilities.
    In the 21st century--your century--China and the United States will 
face the challenge of security in Asia. On the Korean Peninsula, where 
once we were adversaries, today, we are working together for a permanent 
peace and a future freer of nuclear weapons.
    On the Indian subcontinent, just as most of the rest of the world is 
moving away from nuclear danger, India and Pakistan risk sparking a new 
arms race. We are now pursuing a common strategy to move India and 
Pakistan away from further testing and toward a dialog to resolve their 
differences.
    In the 21st century, your generation must face the challenge of 
stopping the spread of deadlier nuclear, chemical, and biological 
weapons. In the wrong hands or the wrong places, these weapons can 
threaten the peace of nations large and small. Increasingly, China and 
the United States agree on the importance of stopping proliferation. 
That is why we are beginning to act in concert to control the world's 
most dangerous weapons.
    In the 21st century, your generation will have to reverse the 
international tide of crime and drugs. Around the world, organized crime 
robs people of billions of dollars every year and undermines trust in 
government. America knows all about the devastation and despair that 
drugs can bring to schools and neighborhoods. With borders on more than 
a dozen countries, China has become a crossroad for smugglers of all 
kinds.
    Last year, President Jiang and I asked senior Chinese and American 
law enforcement officials to step up our cooperation against these 
predators, to stop money from being laundered, to stop aliens from being 
cruelly smuggled, to stop currencies from being undermined by 
counterfeiting. Just this month, our Drug Enforcement Agency opened an 
office in Beijing, and soon Chinese counternarcotics experts will be 
working out of Washington.
    In the 21st century, your generation must make it your mission to 
ensure that today's progress does not come at tomorrow's expense. 
China's remarkable growth in the last two decades has come with a toxic 
cost, pollutants that foul the water you drink and the air you breathe. 
The cost is not only environmental; it is also serious in terms of the 
health consequences of your people and in terms of the drag on economic 
growth.
    Environmental problems are also increasingly global as well as 
national. For example, in the near future, if present energy use 
patterns persist, China will overtake the United States as the world's 
largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the gases which are the principal 
cause of global warming. If the nations of the world do not reduce the 
gases which are causing global warming, sometime in the next century 
there is a serious risk of dramatic changes in climate which will change 
the way we live and the way we work, which could literally bury some 
island nations under mountains of water and undermine the economic and 
social fabric of nations.
    We must work together. We Americans know from our own experience 
that it is possible to grow an economy while improving the environment. 
We must do that together for ourselves and for the world. Building on 
the work that our Vice President, Al Gore, has done previously with the 
Chinese Government, President Jiang and I are working together on ways 
to bring American clean energy technology to help improve air quality 
and grow the Chinese economy at the same time.

[[Page 1258]]

    But I will say this again--this is not on my remarks--your 
generation must do more about this. This is a huge challenge for you, 
for the American people, and for the future of the world. And it must be 
addressed at the university level, because political leaders will never 
be willing to adopt environmental measures if they believe it will lead 
to large-scale unemployment or more poverty. The evidence is clear; that 
does not have to happen. You will actually have more rapid economic 
growth and better paying jobs, leading to higher levels of education and 
technology if we do this in the proper way. But you and the university, 
communities in China, the United States, and throughout the world will 
have to lead the way.
    In the 21st century, your generation must also lead the challenge of 
an international financial system that has no respect for national 
borders. When stock markets fall in Hong Kong or Jakarta, the effects 
are no longer local; they are global. The vibrant growth of your own 
economy is tied closely, therefore, to the restoration of stability and 
growth in the Asia-Pacific region.
    China has steadfastly shouldered its responsibilities to the region 
and the world in this latest financial crisis, helping to prevent 
another cycle of dangerous devaluations. We must continue to work 
together to counter this threat to the global financial system and to 
the growth and prosperity which should be embracing all of this region.
    In the 21st century, your generation will have a remarkable 
opportunity to bring together the talents of our scientists, doctors, 
engineers into a shared quest for progress. Already the breakthroughs we 
have achieved in our areas of joint cooperation--in challenges from 
dealing with spina bifida to dealing with extreme weather conditions and 
earthquakes--have proved what we can do together to change the lives of 
millions of people in China and the United States and around the world. 
Expanding our cooperation in science and technology can be one of our 
greatest gifts to the future.
    In each of these vital areas that I have mentioned, we can clearly 
accomplish so much more by walking together rather than standing apart. 
That is why we should work to see that the productive relationship we 
now enjoy blossoms into a fuller partnership in the new century.
    If that is to happen, it is very important that we understand each 
other better, that we understand both our common interest and our shared 
aspirations and our honest differences. I believe the kind of open, 
direct exchange that President Jiang and I had on Saturday at our press 
conference, which I know many of you watched on television, can both 
clarify and narrow our differences, and more important, by allowing 
people to understand and debate and discuss these things, can give a 
greater sense of confidence to our people that we can make a better 
future.
    From the windows of the White House, where I live in Washington, DC, 
the monument to our first President, George Washington, dominates the 
skyline. It is a very tall obelisk. But very near this large monument 
there is a small stone which contains these words: ``The United States 
neither established titles of nobility and royalty, nor created a 
hereditary system. State affairs are put to the vote of public 
opinion.''
    This created a new political situation, unprecedented from ancient 
times to the present. How wonderful it is. Those words were not written 
by an American. They were written by Xu Jiyu, Governor of Fujian 
Province, inscribed as a gift from the Government of China to our Nation 
in 1853.
    I am very grateful for that gift from China. It goes to the heart of 
who we are as a people, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 

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