[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 27 (Monday, July 6, 1998)]
[Pages 1302-1304]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the People of Guilin

July 2, 1998

    Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for 
welcoming us to your community and for your fine remarks. And, Senator 
Baucus, thank you for what you said. I want to thank you and all the 
Members of the United States Congress who are here with you. Our 
American Ambassador to China and the Chinese Ambassador to the United 
States and the other members of the Chinese Government who are here, and 
especially I'd like to thank Chairman Ding for being here and our 
Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and others from the White House. 
We are all delighted to be among you in Guilin today.
    I would also like to express my appreciation to the seven Chinese 
citizens with whom I have just met because they are taking an active 
role in helping to clean up the environment, either of this area or the 
entire country. And I thank them for that, and they're all right there. 
I'd like to ask them to stand up because they spoke for all of China to 
me today. Please stand. [Applause]
    And since we're here to talk about saving the environment, I want to 
thank Ambassador Li for giving me this energy-efficient air conditioner. 
[Laughter]
    Since Chinese civilization first began to express itself thousands 
of years ago, its poems and paintings have sung of the beauty of the 
land, the air, the water. No place in China is more evocative of the 
beauty of your country than Guilin. The stunning mountains along the Li 
River are instantly familiar to millions and millions of Americans. When 
we see them, the landscapes of Guilin remind us of China's past, but we 
know they are

[[Page 1303]]

alive, and we are grateful for their preservation.
    A new sense of cooperation is building between the people of China 
and the people of the United States, based on our shared ties of 
commerce and culture, our common security interests, and our common 
enthusiasm for the future. But a big part of that cooperation must rest 
on our common understanding that we live on the same planet, sharing the 
same oceans, and breathing the same air.
    Not so many years ago in the United States, one of our rivers was so 
polluted it actually caught on fire. Foul air blanketed our cities; acid 
rain blighted our landscape. Over the last generation, we have worked 
hard to restore our natural treasures and to find a way to conduct our 
economy that is more in harmony with the environment.
    China's extraordinary growth has put the same kind of pressures on 
your environment, and the costs of growth are rising right along with 
your prosperity. You know better than I that polluted air and water are 
threatening your remarkable progress. Smog has caused entire Chinese 
cities to disappear from satellite photographs. And respiratory illness 
is China's number one health problem.
    We also know that more and more environmental problems in the United 
States, in China, and elsewhere are not just national problems, they are 
global problems. We must work together to protect the environment, and 
there is a great deal that we can do together.
    China has the world's longest meteorological records, going back 
over 500 years. They help us clearly to understand the problem of global 
warming. The 5 warmest years since the 15th century have all been in the 
1990's; 1997 was the warmest year ever recorded. And if present trends 
continue, 1998 will break the record. We know that if this trend 
continues, it will bring more and more severe weather events, and it 
will disrupt the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the world 
during the coming century.
    China is already taking impressive steps to protect its future. 
Leaded gasoline is being banned. Inefficient stoves have been upgraded. 
People can find out about air quality from newspapers. Communities and 
provinces and the National Government are doing more to clean up rivers. 
Chinese scientists are fighting deforestation and soil erosion. And 
citizens are doing more to promote public education about the 
environment among families and especially among children.
    The United States is determined to strengthen our cooperation with 
you. Last year our Vice President, Al Gore, and the Chinese Government 
launched a forum to coordinate sustainable development and environmental 
protection. In October at our summit, President Jiang and I oversaw the 
beginning of a joint initiative on clean energy. This week we have made 
important new progress. We will provide China assistance to monitor air 
quality. We will increase our support for programs that support 
renewable energy sources to decrease China's dependence on coal.
    We are helping China develop its coal gasification and working with 
the Chinese to make financing available for clean energy projects 
through the Export-Import Bank. Because the United States and China are 
the world's two largest emitters of greenhouse gases that are 
dangerously warming our planet, we must do more to avoid increasing 
severe droughts and floods and the other kinds of destructive things 
that will occur.
    Let me say, Mr. Mayor, I want to extend my sympathies to you on 
behalf of the American people for the families who suffered losses in 
the recent flooding here. It occurred just a few days ago, and some of 
our young Americans were already here working on the trip. They were 
honored to be able to work with you in some of the sandbagging and other 
things that were done. But we grieve with you in the losses that were 
sustained.
    We cannot completely eliminate floods and fires and other natural 
disasters, but we know they will get worse if we do not do something 
about global warming. There are many people who simply don't believe 
that anything can be done about it because they don't believe that you 
can grow an economy unless you use energy in the same way America and 
Europe have used it for the last 50 years--more and more energy, more 
and more pollution to get more and more growth. That's what they 
believe. But I disagree.

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    Without any loss of economic opportunity, we can conserve energy 
much more than we do; we can use clean as opposed to dirty energy 
sources much more than we do; and we can adopt new technologies to make 
the energy we have go further much more than we do.
    Now is the time to join our citizens and our governments, our 
businesses and our industries, in the fight against pollution and global 
warming, even as we fight for a brighter economic future for the people 
of China and the people of the entire world.
    As we move forward together let us, Chinese and Americans, preserve 
what we have inherited from the past, and in so doing, preserve the 
future we are working so hard to build for our children.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 12:22 p.m. on the Camel Hill Lawn in Seven 
Star Park. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Cai Yong Lin of Guilin; 
U.S. Ambassador to China James M. Sassar; Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. 
Li Xhaoxing; Ding Zongyi, chairman, Chinese Children's Medical Society; 
and President Jiang Zemin of China. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of these remarks.