Your social and economic transformation has been even more remarkable, moving from a closed command economic system to a driving, increasingly market-based and driven economy, generating two decades of unprecedented growth, giving people greater freedom to travel within and outside China, to vote in village elections, to own a home, choose a job, attend a better school. As a result you have lifted literally hundreds of millions of people from poverty. Per capita income has more than doubled in the last decade. Most Chinese people are leading lives they could not have imagined just 20 years ago.
Of course, these changes have also brought disruptions in settled patterns of life and work, and have imposed enormous strains on your environment. Once every urban Chinese was guaranteed employment in a state enterprise. Now you must compete in a job market. Once a Chinese worker had only to meet the demands of a central planner in Beijing. Now the global economy means all must match the quality and creativity of the rest of the world. For those who lack the right training and skills and support, this new world can be daunting.
In the short-term, good, hardworking people -- some, at least will find themselves unemployed. And, as all of you can see, there have been enormous environmental and economic and health care costs to the development pattern and the energy use pattern of the last 20 years -- from air pollution to deforestation to acid rain and water shortage.
In the face of these challenges new systems of training and social security will have to be devised, and new environmental policies and technologies will have to be introduced with the goal of growing your economy while improving the environment. Everything I know about the intelligence, the ingenuity, the enterprise of the Chinese people and everything I have heard these last few days in my discussions with President Jiang, Prime Minister Zhu and others give me confidence that you will succeed.