52_2003年英国首相布莱尔在上海商务论坛上的演讲.docVIP

Speech to Business Forum in Shanghai by British Prime Minister Tony Blair 22 July 2003 First of all can I thank Euromoney for having put on this Business Forum and thank so many of you for coming to listen to me, and I am absolutely delighted to be back in Shanghai again. I came here first in 1988. I don’t suppose any of these buildings were here in 1988. Then I came back five years ago, and I have come back today and I have seen another remarkable transformation. It is a quite extraordinary city you have here, and congratulations to everybody who is involved in its development, because I think you are well on your way to being a world class city by 2015. We fully support that ambition, and I should also say congratulations to Shanghai because they won their bids to host the Special Olympics in 2007, and then Expo in 2010. And the links between UK companies and Shanghai are getting ever closer, and actually between the people as well. When I was with the Mayor, walking along the Bund (phon) just a short time ago, there was a woman journalist who rushed up to me to ask me a question, she finished asking me the question, and I said to her - because I thought she spoke very good English - where did she learn the English. She had just been a Cambridge graduate and was returning to do her viva for her degree tomorrow. And it is an amazing thing to think now that you have more Chinese students coming to the UK than any other country, so the UK is your first destination for students from China, and that is a very important thing as well. And whereas in Shanghai just a few years ago, when I was last here in 1998, so they tell me that the student visas were around about 1,000, in 2002 we issued 5,000. So we are getting bound together in that way as well. And there are other things that I think we are learning from each other too. Take urban development for example. Some development projects in China, such as the western development strategy, aim to meet the core infrastructu