China calls for concerted efforts to tackle global challenges

• Source: Xinhua
• [08:49 July 09 2009]
• Comments

On behalf of Chinese President Hu Jintao, State Councilor Dai Bingguo (front) attends the leaders' meeting of China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico (G5) in L'Aquila, Italy, July 8, 2009. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo called on Wednesday in L'Aquila for concerted efforts among five leading developing countries (G5) to tackle various global challenges.

On behalf of Chinese President Hu Jintao, Dai addressed the G5 leaders' meeting, expounding China's position on how the G5 unite to address major international issues as well as proposals.

Dai, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and President of South Africa Jacob Zuma, exchanged views on various issues like tackling global financial crisis, regulation of global financial system, climate change and non-traditional security threats.

The G5 leaders' meeting was aimed to strike a common position for the outreach session of the G8 Summit, to be held later on Thursday.

 In his speech, Dai said the global financial crisis was still deepening, which has exerted severe negative impact on the world economy and people's life, adding that the developing countries fall the biggest victims to the international financial crisis as they are weak in economic foundation as well as in their capacity of self-healing.

If such trend were not reversed, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals would not be achieved in due time, and the achievements made by the countries over the past years would fade away, Dai warned.

The state councilor said boosting economy is the basis and precondition to resolving all the relevant problems, and the five leading developing countries should unite to alleviate the damage of the global financial crisis.

 Dai urged the G5 countries to exert more efforts in the following four aspects:

-- To push the international community to respect developing countries' choice of economic development models and ensure them adequate room for development policy;

-- To push the reform of international economic, financial and trade system and increase developing countries' voice, representativeness and role in decision-making in this aspect;

-- To push the developed countries to implement their promise on increasing assistance, debt redemption, market opening and technology transfer and other consensus reached between the developed countries and the developing countries;

-- To push the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and regional development banks to initiate new assistance measures to help the developing countries ensure stability of financial system, boost economic development and enhance their capacity of self- healing.