June 05, 2005
BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged Tuesday to cooperate with the six-nation Greater Mekong Subregion group but issued a veiled warning the region should not become overly dependent on China.
In the opening speech of the second GMS economic cooperation summit in China's southwestern Kunming city, Wen said China had already contributed to the region substantially despite being at a "critical stage of development".
"China will mainly count on itself in the process of development, but it also needs better cooperation with the outside, particularly with its neighbors," Wen said in the speech carried by state television.
"Despite the impressive growth of the Chinese economy as a whole, we must be sober enough to recognize the fact that China's per capita GDP ranks lower than the 100th in the world due to its huge population," the premier said.
"There is still a very long way to go before China modernizes itself, which will require strenuous efforts of several or even a dozen of generations ... All of us are at a critical stage of development."
Wen said China had furnished money for projects like the Kunming-Bangkok highway, provided training programs in various sectors and set up a 20 million dollars fund under the Asian Development Bank.
He urged greater cooperation in regional infrastructure construction, while also underscoring the need to step up environmental protection, and joint control of communicable diseases, especially HIV/AIDS and avian flu.
Besides China, the GMS grouping also includes Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar and also enjoys strong backing from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen, Myanmar Prime Minister Than Shwe and Laotian Prime Minister Boungnang Vorachit are attending the two-day conclave in Yunnan province's Kunming city.
Since the GMS was set up in cooperation with the ADB in 1992, the bank has provided about 1.18 billion dollars in loans and an additional 140 million dollars in technical assistance to help jump-start economic development in the region.
The region has also benefited from about 5.6 billion dollars in direct foreign investment, the Xinhua news agency said.
The ADB expects to pour another 1.0 billion dollars of funding into the six-nation group in the next five years, bank officials said earlier.
"We will provide a lot of funding over the next five years and we expect that the sum will be something like 1.0 billion US dollars," Rajat M. Nag, the bank's director general for the region, told Xinhua.