Passage 1
I am delighted to be with you. I first visited China 22 years ago, but this is my first visit to your university, in a city whose students have helped shape the development of modem China. So I am privileged to have the opportunity to share ideas about U.S.-China relations in the modem era of globalization with people who will, I expect, help write Chinese history -- through deeds and words -- in the 21st century.//
It was the students of Beijing who in May 1919 protested the Treaty of Versailles’ failure to expel Japanese occupiers from China. In that action, the source of the May 4 Movement, Beijing’s students not only made a bold statement about China’s freedom from foreign occupation and right to self-determination. They also ushered in the era of modern China, taking a decisive step toward China’s emergence from imperial rule and stagnation. I think it is useful to begin our exchanges about the future from the vantage point of what happened almost a century ago in this historic city.//
Chinese are rightly proud of the history of the world’s oldest continuous civilization, and look to it for lessons. America is a young nation by comparison, but suggestion that we live exclusively in the present, unshaped by history, is a misleading caricature. So I would like to share with you my perceptions about what this last century has meant to our two countries, how we have perceived each other, and where we are going. Many people talk about this new millennium as an unprecedented age of globalization. Extraordinary it is, but unprecedented it is not. //
In 1902, the automobile was just coming into use in the United States. Man’s first airplane flight occurred 99 years ago, on a beach in North Carolina. The wireless radio followed in a few years, transforming societies -- much like the Internet is doing today. The telephone enabled people to converse across mountains, rivers, and indeed around the world. The United States was transformed by this earlier era of globalization in the most fundamental way -- the face of its population. In each year of the first decade of the last century, new immigrants to America numbered about one percent of the existing population.//
A country that had been largely composed of people of English, German, Irish, and Africa descent found itself the chosen destination of millions of immigrants from different parts of the planet -- Poles, Russians, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and Jews, among others. Their contributions to American economic, social, scientific, intellectual, and political life were enormous. We learned that openness -- to people, goods, capital, and of course ideas -- is our greatest strength as a country and society. Although change and adaptation and intrusions from outside can be frightening, and pose difficulties of adjustment, openness spurs dynamism, flexibility, competition, liberty, and the individual pursuits of happiness.//
