Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I welcome you all to the ASEAN Secretariat and I thank KADIN, the Indonesian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, for organising this event.

Two days ago, the ASEAN Heads of Government and Premier Zhu Rongji of China received the report of the ASEAN-China Experts Group. The report is entitled “Forging Closer ASEAN-China Economic Relations in the 21^st Century.”   As you may recall, at the ASEAN-China Summit in Singapore last year, Premier Zhu Rongji proposed the setting-up of an ASEAN-China Experts Group to look into the impact of China’s accession to the WTO on ASEAN and measures to strengthen cooperation and integration between ASEAN and China, including a possible free trade area.

The report that has been submitted sets out areas for enhanced cooperation, including trade and investment facilitation measures, and the establishment of a free trade area between ASEAN and China within 10 years, with special and differential treatment and flexibility for the newer ASEAN members.

At their meeting two days ago, the Leaders of ASEAN and China gave their general endorsement to this report and directed the Ministers and officials to work out ways of carrying out its recommendations. The report will be on the ASEAN Web site soon.

I will try to make a few brief points.  The first is the fact that China’s economy has surged to become one of the leading economies of the world, in what has been a veritable economic miracle.

Another fact, and this is related to the first, is that the Chinese economy is fast opening to the world. China’s imminent membership in the WTO will lock this process in. China’s growth and opening present formidable challenges for ASEAN and others, but they also offer tremendous opportunities. And it is because of these opportunities that ASEAN has supported China’s WTO membership from the beginning. Even if ASEAN and China were merely to treat each other on a most-favoured-nation basis under WTO rules, each would still have to respond to the challenges and seize the opportunities. The proposed free trade area would in some cases magnify the challenges and in some cases enlarge the opportunities.

The Government of China, the individual governments of ASEAN, and ASEAN as a group, are taking policy measures so as to manage the challenges better and to enhance the opportunities.  But governments can only set the policy environment and the policy parameters. It is business enterprises that do the actual business transactions, so that they have to be the ones to actually respond to the challenges and they are the ones to seize the opportunities. Perhaps, mindsets will have to be changed. Industries and companies will have to restructure, and new industries may even have to be created. For ASEAN businesses, there will surely be intensified Chinese competition in third countries, and in the ASEAN market itself. But they would also have before them the massive and fast-growing market of China.  At the same time, Chinese firms would have expanded opportunities for both trade and investment in ASEAN.  In order to do this effectively, business firms of both sides must have contacts, must network and must cooperate. It is in this light that I welcome the launching of the ASEAN-China Business Council, fittingly enough on the occasion of the visit of Premier Zhu Rongji to Indonesia, one of ASEAN’s founding members.

I think that the setting up of the Council is essential for the necessary contacts for networking and to match the growing cooperation between ASEAN and China in the governmental sphere. The Council must not stop at getting organized. It must be active. It must work hard together. It must help to produce actual business transactions, large and small. Not least, I am quite sure that the governments of ASEAN and China will look to the Council for policy advice.

In other words, I think that the Council should exercise the leadership that is its primary purpose. The setting up of the Web site is a good start.  I am also glad to see that the ACBC is planning to set up its own Secretariat.

I must point out that this Secretariat will only be as effective as the amount of responsibility, authority and resources given to it. The Secretariat must be able to give the support and take the initiatives that are expected of it and it must in turn be fully supported.

For our part, I wish to assure you of the ASEAN Secretariat’ s full cooperation and support, and it is in this spirit that I wish the Council success.