Former President Bill Clinton delivered the speech at the Four Seasons in Austin, Texas on March 31, 2015. | AP Photo Full text: Bill Clinton's China - U.S. private investment summit speech

PRES. BILL CLINTON: Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you.

Thank you very much, Jay. I want to thank you and my longtime friend and former coworker, Debbie Schiff, for inviting me here, and Mark Lindsay, who's going to come up in a minute and ask questions.


I find if you thanks someone in advance for asking your questions, you get better questions. (Laughter.)

I want to thank Mayor Steve Adler for welcoming us back to Austin. I never had a bad day in Austin, Texas, and I've been coming here 43 years. (Applause.) And it's a wonderful place.

I want to especially welcome our friends from China, who have come a long way to be part of this, and tell you that I believe this is a very important occasion. I think the presence of a lot of people here indicates this, the former Secretary of Agriculture and head of UNICEF, Ann Veneman, who worked with me very closely in the aftermath of the tsunami in south Asia and a lot of other things we did together.

Ambassador Locke, Ambassador Randt. Mark Updegrove of the LBJ Library, thank you for the work you've done in holding your conference.

The relationship for the U.S. and China is perhaps the most important one for the next 20 years for the whole world, and it's an interesting relationship now.

And what's going on in Asia is very interesting and very important. You have a strong leader in China in President Xi, a strong leader in Japan in Prime Minister Abe, a strong leader in India in Prime Minister Modi, who has enrolled 120 million people with their first bank accounts in eight months. (Applause.)

This is all very hopeful. We're about to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the reconciliation and full opening of relations with Vietnam this year, something that I was very proud of.

And we all know what the problems are, but I want to talk about the opportunities and why I think it's so important that you're here.

When I was president, I realized that the time in which I had the privilege to serve was first the first entire presidency to be conducted after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War; second, that we were rapidly evolving into the most interdependent age in human history.

Interestingly enough, since all of you are here, it's important not to say that's always going to be good, because last year we acknowledged or observed the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. Before World War I, the wealthy countries in the world were actually slightly more trade dependent as a percentage of GDP than they are today.

So everyone said happy times are here to stay; yes, there are problems, but they'll never get in the way of all these people making all this money. And a crazy person killed the Archduke in Sarajevo and we were off to the races. A war people thought would only last a few months lasted through November of 1918 and claimed more lives than any conflict in history up to that point, as we fought with 20th century technology and 19th century battle tactics.

What's that got to do with today? Today, as it was in a different way when I was president, our interdependent world, which goes way beyond what happened before World War I because of information technology and travel and massive movements of capital every day across national borders, our interdependent world is full of positive possibilities, as represented by the rise of China and the presence of all of our Chinese friends here today, and the potential we have for investment both ways for the creation of new businesses, new jobs and new opportunities. It's been good to us or you wouldn't be in these seats.

But it is also a world full of significant challenges. There is too much inequality for a consumer economy to sweep the globe, around the world and even in here in America.

After the financial crash, it's gotten worse, and I didn't think it could get much worse than it has been since the dawn of the 21st century. And that's because at least in our country, with fewer conventional economic opportunities, people with funds and the financial industry as a whole put more energy into trading than investing. And if you swap out money and you don't invest it, then some people will make a lot of money but you won't make money the old fashioned way, creating jobs and businesses and opportunities that have a huge multiplier effect on the economy. So that's a big challenge.

The second big challenge we face is global instability. Look how fast the financial crisis spread across the globe, and how difficult it is to overcome in the EU for Greece, for Spain, for Italy. The Irish seem to be doing pretty well, but they're very small.

And there is enormous political instability, particularly in the Middle East and Afghanistan and elsewhere where the very concept of the nation state is under assault.

In Nigeria, the biggest country in Africa, full of brilliant, gifted people, with staggering economic achievements, a place where our foundation works on a wide range of areas, it's also the home of Boko Haram.

In Africa you have Kenya trying to finally come to grips with a lot of its serious challenges, and just next door there's al-Shabab wreaking havoc out of Somalia.

And, of course, we had first al-Qaeda, then al-Qaeda in Iraq, and now we have ISIS threatening the most interesting but fragile democracy in the Middle East, Lebanon.

Jordan, a progressively modernizing state, they have these massive numbers of refugees, and they're getting enough aid to feed them and keep them alive, but not enough to generate economic growth and opportunity and any sort of stability. And you have essentially a nihilist philosophy there.

So I thought about the difference in this meeting and what you represent, and one headline I saw in the paper today about how the ISIS militants are now, in addition to beheading people on television and over the Internet, and using children to walk people to their execution, they're not destroying some of the most previous historic relics of the Middle East. Claiming to return us to an ideal past, they are instead trying to erase the past, not building anything but just tearing down and trying to rule through naked terror.

And we have, of course, the regrettable and I think self-defeating path that Russia has chosen in Ukraine.

So we're dealing with all these things.

To me that makes it perfectly clear what we should all be doing, believe it or not. We should be doing whatever we can in our current situation to build up the positive forces of our interdependence and to reduce the negative ones.

And if you ask me any question on any issue in any country in the world, I would run it through a filter, and I would ask myself, will this increase the positive or reduce the negative forces roiling around in the world today? If so, I'm for it. If not, I'm against it.

One of the most distinguished people here I think academically is Mr. Khalid Malik here, and he said to me on the way out, and I took a picture with his larger family, he said, "You know, our family is the intermarriage of a Muslim and a Jewish family." And I said, "Thank God, and praise Allah." (Laughter, applause.)

And why? Because religion in the service of politics is a dangerous thing, and requires a highly selective reading of all sacred scriptures. After all, the Torah says "He who turns aside a strange might as well turn away from the Most High God." The Christian bible says that the most important commandment is to love God with all your heart, and the second is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself. And the Koran says that Allah put different people on the earth not that they might despise one another but that they might come to know one another and learn from one another. So you've got to get rid of all that if you really want to hate people. That takes a lot of effort and leads to a lot of loss.

So that brings me to the current moment. I have -- I'm not sure what time it is because I just got back from Singapore yesterday morning. (Laughter.) I had the signal honor of representing my country at the request of the White House and the government of Singapore, along with Henry Kissinger, at the funeral of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore.

Fifty-plus years ago, when Singapore was founded, the per capita income was less than a thousand dollars a year. Today, it's over $55,000 a year. For three years in a row the airport in this tiny country has been voted the finest airport in the world. For 31 of those years Lee Kuan Yew led Singapore, then he became the Senior Minister, and then what's called the Minister Mentor afterwards. Along the way, he and I came into contact when he was the Senior Minister, and Goh Chok Tong was the Prime Minister and my colleague.

Now, it's a little country, only 6.5 million people on a little piece of land, but in a very critical place; massive sea lanes all around, a history of ethnic conflict between Chinese and Malays. And they have a diverse population, Chinese, Malay and Indian. Everybody there is bilingual. They use English for commerce and then you are taught in the schools your own language to make sure you understand your language, your culture, your faith, and you carry it into cooperation, not conflict.

What the United States and China have to do now with renewed vigor in Japan, renewed vigor in India, restless independence in Southeast Asia and the Philippines, unresolved problems in North Korea, is to find a way to work through our differences and dramatically accelerate things that benefit us both, because the very idea of the nation state is under assault outside Asia, and we together can prove that in an imperfect world full of necessary agreements and debates and discord, it is the best vehicle for establishing the rule of law, basic opportunity, and lifting people out of poverty.

So that's how I see this. I love this meeting. And I will say this, there's only one person I'm uncomfortable with in this crowd, and that's Admiral Owens here looking at me. (Laughter.) He may be the smartest guy the military has produced in the last 40 years, and I always feel if I have to speak in front of him that I'm being quietly graded and I'm never going to get an A. (Laughter.) But be that as it may, I will try to get through this.

Now, what does that mean? Now, I want to say it doesn't bother me that we have differences of opinion. And we should not seek to abolish them or sweep them under the rug. We should instead become comfortable talking about them.

When I was president and I went to China on the longest state visit I took anywhere, Jiang Zemin, then the president, honored me by allowing me to speak to a university where university students asked me the kind of hard questions they would ask him in America when the shoe was on the other foot. Then he trusted me to have a national press conference and let me make an argument to the Chinese people that they ought to ease up on Tibet and he should meet with the Dalai Lama and he would actually like him if he did.

And we worked through the trade agreement, got to normal trading status, which led to the membership of China in the World Trade Organization, which I thought was very important.

Another lesser known thing we did together that I think will have real impact over the long run is to send a group of Americans there at the invitation of the Chinese to work for years to work through basic legal questions of commerce law, so that it would be possible for people not just in big businesses but in middle and small businesses to do business in China with rules they understood and protections everyone's entitled to. And I love that. I had a lot of the people who actually went there year-in and year-out became friends of mine and I saw how important it was.

After I left office, I began to work in China on the AIDS problem. And I was really honored when our foundation was the first non-governmental organization actually given office space in the Chinese Ministry of Health. They knew they had to deal with it, and after a few years of denial they did what the Chinese are so good at, they turned on a dime and crushed the problem.

There were actually two different AIDS problems in China. There was the big city traditional AIDS problem, basically born of drugs and sex. But there were rural Chinese villages that were literally wiped out because the younger adults who stayed behind to take care of the children and the older people while everyone else went to the city to work needed money desperately and found an honorable way to earn it by giving blood to the urban hospitals so they would have adequate blood banks. But China then had the same problem we had in America in the early '80s, which was that many of them gave blood with improperly sterilized equipment and became infected and whole villages were wiped out.

So we went into China at the request of the Chinese government. A friend of mine from Chicago with a particular love for China completely funded everything we did there for three years. And we worked to help them get adequate medicine, get adequate testing equipment.

The viral load equipment, actually the whole testing mechanism was actually developed by someone who's here in this audience today. And you have to be able to test to see what the viral load is to know whether the medicine's working or not.

And then I had an amazing encounter with the Minister of Health. First, I went to Tsinghua University more than a decade ago and gave a speech, and four ministries were represented on the platform with me.

And a young AIDS activist, who was reminiscent of the ACT UP people a decade earlier in America, stood up with a very spiky hairdo and was giving me hell about something. And so I invited him up and I put my arm around him and let him say something to the audience. And I took him over and he shook hands on national television with all these senior Chinese ministers.

Ten days later, Prime Minister Wen had AIDS activists in his office. Six weeks later, President Hu was in hospital wards shaking hands with people dying, and the whole thing turned around. It was breathtaking.

The Health Minister said, okay, we've got this under control at a national level, but you have to understand we have politics in China just like you do. And just like in America, the rural areas are more conservative than the urban areas. So we want you to go out to your Yunnan Province and to Anhui Province. And I went up to the Uighur Autonomous Region on a different trip, and we want you to sit with people who are HIV positive. Have meals with the young adults, play with the children, let us show it on television so people will understand how this is communicated and how it's not. And it's safe to treat their neighbors as their friends so we can actually do something about this. And they did.

And we don't work there anymore because they don't need us. They had the money and the infrastructure once the technology and the established practices were put in place. Now, during all this time there were arguments about trade differences and currency values, and all the stuff that occupies the headlines. But we found a way to seek common ground, get to know each other better, and work together. And along the way save a lot of lives.

So my belief is that that explains what we should do. There may come a time when the U.S. and China will become involved in some irreconcilable conflict, as many pessimists believe, but it doesn't have to happen if we work for the best and both plan for our security. Only a fool doesn't plan for the worst, but you should work for the best.

And this is a little thing, but the most encouraging thing to me about the future, if you're from China whether you ought to make a ten-year investment in the United States, and whether we should be making long-term investments in China was the announcement of the Presidency, and Prime Minister Abe about their dispute over these small islands that they've been arguing about.

And essentially what they said in plain English, like if you're an American politician and you read this rather carefully crafted statement, what it really said is, we are not going to war over this. We will both take our nationalist positions, we will stick up for national pride, but relax. We are not going to let this kill any chance we've got to make this a season of Asian ascendance. And that was really good.

And that's what I think we have to work for. There are lots of good opportunities here, and we still have a lot to learn from each other. And the rise of India and the rise of Japan creates amazing opportunities for synergy as well as for friction.

Mr. Abe is the leader of a truly great nation that doesn't have enough people to support real growth, where no matter how much technological advance they get they're not going to be able to deal with the challenge of having very small families and very long lives, but more and more people in their later years.

Since they don't want to have a lot of immigrants he's got to get more women in the workforce and convince more people who look like me to work later in life. And I wouldn't bet against him. I think there's a chance. He's trying to join security alliances in Asia. He doesn't want to be totally dwarfed by China and rendered insignificant. But, he clearly recognizes that cooperation is better than conflict.

Mr. Modi in India has exactly the reverse problem of China. China is great at aggregating and deploying capital for massive projects. India is wildly successful in entrepreneurialism. They have a million non-governmental organizations. I work with a lot of them sometimes I think I work with most of them. And I like working there. But, they have been terrible at aggregating and deploying capital so they don't have enough infrastructure to take their economic growth away from the 35 percent that are in the aura of the high-tech cities into 100 percent of the country.

So Modi is trying to learn from China how to do that. The United States, alas, has become more like India than China. That is, we spend so much of our tax money on yesterday we're not investing enough in tomorrow. And we have so much antipathy for the government we forget that public investment is necessary for private growth. So we have something to learn from China.

China, I believe, will move sooner or later from creating more economic freedom and social mobility and the Chinese have lifted more people above the extreme global poverty line in less time than any entity in history. And that, too, is a form of freedom. Being able to choose where you go to college and what you learn and what you do for a living is a freedom. But, there is still a lot of nervousness about dissent. Singapore had the same thing, a radically different economic system, much smaller country, but sharing the fear of the Chinese that if you have too much dissent you could have disintegration.

One of the things I learned when I was President working with Boris Yeltsin about expanding NATO, he said to me why? I said, Boris, you surely don't believe that I would use an air base in Poland to bomb Western Russia. He said, of course you wouldn't. But, a lot of little old ladies in Western Russia think you would, which is why Putin got so much support when he took over Crimea.

He said, look, Bill, he said countries are like individuals, they have hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares. You didn't ever have Napoleon or Hitler all the way up in your belly. And we have people who lived through Hitler and whose grandparents told them stories about Napoleon. And so perhaps we are too nervous about trying to control the near abroad. But, you have to work with me on this.

So China also has dreams of nightmares, memories of bad things that have happened in the form of disintegration. I understand that. But, I do think that it's too bad these women have been arrested in the run up to the 20th Anniversary of the Beijing Conference. And I'm glad so many Chinese are saying the same thing. And I think that there's a way to be a strong country and tolerate dissent.

It became comical when I was president because I liked Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji so much, and once I got a cartoon in the mail when I was fighting out that Whitewater business. And Jiang Zemin and I are sitting together at a state dinner, and in the first frame I say to President Jiang, I said, "You know, you're doing great economically, but our country has more human rights." And he looked at me and he said, "Yes, and if you were the leader of China Ken Starr would be in prison making running shoes." (Laughter.) So I saved that cartoon for a long time. I must say there were days when I wondered who had the better model. (Laughter.)

But I say that for the serious purpose. We are all moving toward a time when greater creativity is more important. When we will all have to -- if President Xi hadn't changed the one child policy, the United States would have been younger than China within a couple of decades because of our immigration policy. We're barely above replacement in America with families that are static here, but we have enough immigrants, and that's another reason we need immigration reform, that we have continued to be young and we continue to grow more diverse, and we've continued to be able to function well.

But China is going to change that policy, and I think as it gets more comfortable with its world role. And I'm very grateful for the work we did on disarmament, on North Korea, on the Asian Financial Crisis together, where 20 years earlier China would have devalued its currency to keep from getting hurt by the Asian Financial Crisis, and they didn't. And it got us through it a lot faster.

I think the security will build up and they will see that having a creative economy requires the ability of people in public life to take criticism from private citizens, and it won't kill you. And so I hope for that day and I hope for that debate to go on. Meanwhile, we should be doing what we can do. China has made real strides in trying to move away from the pollution of its old reliance on coal to generate electricity. You've done great with solar and wind. You'll find a lot of opportunities in America today, Texas, Iowa, and Minnesota, all three today have a base load electric generating capacity that's 20 percent wind.

And almost every American state now without any subsidies wind is cheaper than coal. Solar would have total parity with coal today if there was parity of financing. And I won't bore you with all the details, but it's economical today without much subsidy in probably 20 states. And it won't be long until it will be economical everywhere. The idea that moving away from a greenhouse gas-based economy to one that reduces greenhouse gases has to be bad for the growth of jobs, businesses and incomes is simply not true, not if we do it in a smart way.

The agreement President Xi made with President Obama to reduce hydrofluorocarbons creates an enormous potential market because most HFCs in China, in India, and in older American cities are produced by antique room air conditioners. And you can convert them, but actually it's cheaper to build new ones, which means there's an enormous market for that just to keep the agreements that have already been made, and then an enormous market for what to do with the scrap mountains high of all those old air conditioners. And that's just one example.

The sequencing of the human genome, if you're an American I spent $3 billion of your money on it, and I keep reading all the time about how we spent all this money and we expected miracles and what has happened? Well, the year before last what had happened already was $176 billion in new investment just in America spinning out of the genome. That's pretty good return on investment. And we've identified the two genetic variances that put women at high risk of breast cancer at an early age.

We are not far from being able to send home every young mother with a young baby girl, something I'm partial to now that I'm a grandfather, with a little gene card that says whether your child has this variance or not. If so she should start having tests at about age 25. And then everybody else can do what the American Medical Society says and wait until they're 50.

St. Jude Hospital in Memphis, which is the premiere children's cancer center in America, with staff from over 100 nations discovered something they can now test with the genome test, which is that there's a rare of form of child brain cancer for which there has been for some time a drug that guaranteed 80 percent of the children that had this cancer 100 percent chance of recovery and a normal life, but mysteriously kills the other 20 percent, ended their lives early.

So just experimenting, a doctor there started giving a half-a-dose to the other 20 percent and they all got well. Then the doctor gave a half-a-dose to the 80 percent and they stayed sick. So they sequenced all their genomes, identified the differences, now when every child comes in there because of the genome they get the treatment that they should get in the beginning and they all recover and they all have normal lives. This is the beginning.

With nanotechnology it won't be very long before every person in the United States and every person in China, and increasingly in other countries, can stand in a tube and be scanned four times a year and tell you more than an expensive physical will tell you today. And it will create a lot of opportunities.

So what I want to say is in the meanwhile, we can't let our differences override what we have in common. And we have to find ways to cooperate on these big problems. China has a lot of investment in Afghanistan, which has probably a trillion dollars worth of various things underground that can be mined, maybe more. It's very important that that be done in a responsible way that doesn't rip off the Afghans, builds their own capacity, preserves their environment, and gets enough people involved in that that they just as soon do that rather than drive a truck with a bomb on it. And you can do that. You have more money to do that with state funds than we do right now.

So there are all these places in the world where we can work together for mutual benefit. But it is very, very important to do what you are here to do. We need more Chinese investment in America, just like we need more American investment in China. We need people who work together, who talk all the time who come to trust each other. You don't want all the differences of opinion to go away that will make us stupid. Nobody is right all the time. Differences of opinion are healthy and debate is important, but it is really important to find a way for what we have in common to trump our interesting differences.

That's really the story of what Lee Kuan Yew pulled off in Singapore. In a microcosm, it's what the United States and China have got to try with working with Japan, working with India, finding a cooperative way for China and the states of Southeast Asia to resolve their disputes over the wealth in the South China Sea and elsewhere, around the disputed islands with the Philippines. We've got to find ways to do that.

You cannot do it without trust. You cannot do it without people believing that it is a good thing that the modern world is organized around nation states that work and private economies that pay off. And if we do it we have to find a way then to lift the people who believe that in the most troubled part of the world, the Middle East, and the Afghan-Pakistan area, to do the same thing.

There are lots of unresolved issues here, which are not the subject of this conference. But, I'm just telling you in addition to the fact that I think you can make a lot of money if you're Chinese investing in America and I think you can make a lot of money if you're American investing in China, every time we do something and people come to know each other and trust each other, we increase the chances that the 21st Century world will be one of shared prosperity instead of shared despair, one of shared security instead of shared vulnerability, one of a shared sense of community rather than an endless bleak conflict of competing religious and ethnic identities.

And it will open up all kinds of other things we can do, building the capacity of nation states to function in Africa. I spent a lot of time on that in my healthcare work. If somebody asks our foundation to go in and work on AIDS and malaria, and reducing infant mortality, we try to get the donors to give all the money to the African countries. So they buy the medicine, not us. They buy the equipment not us. We want to build the capacity of government to work. And I have strict no-corruption contracts that require oversight, because corruption is a major reason for the failure of nation states all over the world.

But, we can do this together. If you're Chinese, and I was just trying to make the sale in the next 30 minutes I'd say, look, America is coming back, we're growing well and we're just at the beginning of our capacity to grow, which his one reason wage levels haven't risen as much as the stock market has. The labor markets aren't tight enough. We do have a lot of work to do in our K through 12 education. We don't have the kind of apprenticeship programs we need. And we could learn a lot from Germany in that regard. But, this country has lots of natural gas, more oil. We'll be exporting energy soon, as well as all the clean energy sources.

It's got a great information technology base, even though we have lousy national broadband download speeds, because it's a big old country and we haven't done what South Korea did, which we should all learn from, where the government built the infrastructure and they didn't have to worry about an open Internet. It's cheaper to use there and must faster, on average four times faster than ours. And all this fight we've been having in America about net neutrality it's all because we depended on the big companies to build the infrastructure and they have a right to recover their investment. And the only way they can recover it on current terms is to charge more for people who can pay for faster. And that violates what we want, but we, Americans, we've got to grow up. We didn't want to pay to get a system that would give us net neutrality and cheap fast download speeds, and every country has got some of that where we say what we want and then we don't act like we're prepared to do what it takes to get it.

That is also something we'll learn from each other. More Americans who understand what the strengths of the Chinese economy are the more likely we are to make good economic decisions here. The more Chinese who understand what the strengths of the American economy are and how you will need a whole creative class to move to the next stage of development, the more likely the Chinese are to feel comfortable with political dissent, and to believe you can have national cohesion, national unity, national loyalty and still allow people to say they disagree with you.

And I will just close with this thought. The most important political book I have read in the last five years by far was written by a Nobel Prize winning microbiologist who is now almost 90, E.O. Wilson. It's called The Social Conquest of Earth. And Chinese and Americans will find something to identify with. Wilson in about 250 pages traces as best he can from the evidence we have the history of all life on planet Earth, not just people, all life, from the emergence of single cell organisms.

He said if you look at the history of life on Earth and you make allowances for the fact that, let's say, the dinosaurs were destroyed 65 million years ago because of the after effects of an asteroid hitting the planet. You have to conclude that there are four species who have been the hardiest. They've been the most successful in avoiding destruction when they could have been killed and they weren't the biggest or the strongest. They are ants, termites, bees, and people.

Twenty years ago I read one of Professor Wilson's books and I learned that the weight, combined weight of all the ants on Earth is greater than the combined weight of all the people on Earth. That's sobering. They laugh because in places where ants are subject to predators when the predator is chasing the ants some of them will run up on the highest blade of grass and sacrifice themselves so everybody else gets away. In very hot climates termites build underground homes with air conditioning. They drill five holes in their roof and they'll only go in and out of one. The others are just to circulate the air. And when it's about to rain they won't go in at all. They sense when they're going to be destroyed if they do that.

People, he says, are the most remarkable cooperators of all and that's what he says. He said ants, termites, bees, and people have prevailed because they cooperate better than all other species. Last week in the Science Times section of the New York Times there was an article saying of all the hundreds of species of spiders on Earth, for reasons no one can explain, 24 separate species have begun to cooperate and instead of solitary spiders spinning webs they're spinning their webs together and they're dramatically stronger. So that they're safer from predators and they get more food.

What's the point of all this? The point is that what you would do to earn a profit and make a living happens to be in my opinion what we need to do to ensure that the 21st Century is a good news story not a bad news story. And the more we can find ways to cooperate and elevate cooperation over constant conflict, the better we're going to do. So I urge you to look at this. It's a really good time for this conference, because America ought to have about five or six really good years now. It's a good time to be investing here.

I think the Chinese President is doing things that make sense. It's a good time to invest there. I think China and Japan have sent a signal to the world that they will cooperate in a healthy, not a -- I mean they will compete in a healthy, not an unhealthy way. And the more we can build trust across all these lines that divide the more we can create a world that avoids the identity politics that bedevil people everywhere. And in the end that's the most important thing. We should be proud of our differences, but we should believe and act on the fact that our common humanity matters more.

Commerce advances that when done fairly, lawfully, and honorably. And so don't feel any pressure, but the whole future of the world may depend upon whether, to what extent and in what manner China and the United States build a common economic, social and political future.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

END

