Under the present favourable and peaceful international circumstances, China and India have a common responsibility to mankind -- to develop. Why so? Because together our two countries have a population of 1.8 billion, or more than one third of the world's total.

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Some countries are drawing up plans for the development of high technology. China has done so too. The next century will see rapid development.

As for the electron-positron collider, first I want to tell you a story. A European friend who is a scientist once asked me why we were undertaking this project when our economy was still underdeveloped. I answered that we had our eyes on long-term development, not just immediate needs.

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The main point I want to make is that the central leadership must have authority. The reform can be successful only if it is conducted under proper leadership and in an orderly fashion. Otherwise, everything will be in a mess, with everyone going his own way. How can we allow that? For several years now I have been objecting to the attitude ``You may have your policy, but I have my counterpolicy.'' There shouldn't be any counterpolicies. If the Central Committee and the State Council have no authority, the situation will get out of control.

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We are both veterans of the international Communist movement, and it is always a pleasure for us to meet. We are both optimists, so we should remember the good days we have known and forget the dark days.

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China suffered greatly from the ten-year disaster, the ``cultural revolution''. In fact, not just from that: as early as the second half of 1957 we began to make ``Left'' mistakes. To put it briefly, we pursued a closed-door policy in foreign affairs and took class struggle as the central task at home. No attempt was made to expand the productive forces, and the policies we formulated were too ambitious for the primary stage of socialism.

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China is deepening its reform, trying to create more favourable conditions for future development. We attach importance not only to our development in this century, but even more to our development in the next. The choice before us is either to continue to make economic progress or to retreat. But to retreat will get us nowhere. Only by deepening reform in every field of endeavour can we ensure that the people will live a relatively comfortable life by the end of this century and that more progress will be made in the next.

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We are carrying out reform in a vast, poor country, and there is no precedent for this anywhere in the world. During the past 39 years of economic development, we have learned from both our successes and our failures. However, we cannot rely solely on our own experience to solve all problems. To develop its economy and shake off poverty and backwardness, China must open to the outside world. By opening up, we mean not only making more contacts with other countries but also drawing on their experience. Unfortunately, we wasted 20 years after 1957, while during those two decades the world developed rapidly. On the other hand, this was useful to us in a way. The experience gained during those 20 years -- particularly the lessons of the ``cultural revolution'' -- taught us that we could not proceed unless we carried out reform and formulated new political, economic and social policies. Accordingly, at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC, we formulated a series of principles and policies and thus took a new path. These policies can be summarized as reform and opening up.

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We are carrying out a thorough and extensive reform. Why? Because we have learned from the ``cultural revolution'' [1966-1976]. The ten-year ``cultural revolution'', together with the period dominated by ``Left'' errors, which began in 1957, caused us to waste twenty years. The period from 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, to 1957 was one of rapid development, but after that problems arose. I don't mean that in those 20 years we did nothing good; we did a lot of work and scored some major achievements, such as the development of the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb and ballistic missiles. However, the overall political situation was chaotic, and the economy either grew slowly or stagnated. Even after the Gang of Four was crushed, we remained for two years at a standstill under the wrong ideological guideline of the ``two whatevers''.

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The central theme of both the Thirteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and the First Plenary Session of the Seventh National People's Congress [March 25-April 13, 1988] was that we must further emancipate our minds and liberate the productive forces.

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