Dear friends, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good afternoon. The just finished Close-Door Meeting was a big success with a lot of achievements. Now I am happy to give you a briefing on the meeting.

I chaired the Conference today and had with me 21 Advisors in the meeting. Also present in the meeting were 8 Vice Governors, leaders of Provincial Government departments, mayors from cities of Guangdong, and senior members from the Advisors' institution. In the beginning of the meeting, I made a key-note speech entitled "Upgrading Guangdong's International Competitiveness and Boosting Its Modernization Drive". After that, the Advisors talked around the Conference theme topic of "International Competitiveness and Guangdong's Development".

The Advisors' speeches, rich in both depth and width, gave many valuable views and suggestions on how Guangdong can improve her international competitiveness from various levels, perspectives and areas, for instance, from global environment to the comparison between Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, from opening wider to the outside world to improving investment environment, from perfecting market mechanism to improving government efficiency, from developing petrochemical industry to enhancing manufacturing industry, from building transnational enterprises to fostering innovative capability, etc. All these opinions and advices are of great significance for Guangdong to comprehensively improve her international competitiveness and to take the lead in China to basically realize modernization under the background of accelerating economic globalization and fierce domestic economic competition from other regions.

The Advisors' Reports and their Close-Door Meeting speeches will be studied more closely. But at the moment, I can share with you at least 2 points.

Firstly, they have helped to broaden our thoughts and define the direction. By making in-depth and clear analysis on how Guangdong can improve her international competitiveness, these reports and speeches have brought to us many new ideas and thoughts from a global and professional perspective. For example, some Advisors suggest that " Guangdong should reduce production cost and increase capital productivity through specialization, so as to give full play to existing advantages in infrastructure and low labor cost", and to that Guangdong should "push manufacturing enterprises to transform into more advanced industrial centers of comprehensive operation". Some other advisors believe that "Guangdong should make use of Hong Kong's advantage to form production-sales alliance, and should improve our international competitiveness by having product differentiation and nationalization". There are views that we should "weave a durable innovative network" and that a "Three Diamonds Strategy" should be pursued, namely, "industry, culture and resort¡±. It is also proposed that Guangdong should focus on building "a successful entrepreneurial market". The Advisors' precious views and suggestions have helped us to widen our horizon, clarify our thoughts, strengthen our confidence and further identifying future directions. With the solid foundation laid in the over 2 decades of reform and opening-up, and with the support and care from the Advisors' organizations, we are very confident on fulfilling our tasks of comprehensively improving our international competitiveness and in realizing modernization.

The 2nd point I would like to make is that we have enhanced understanding and promoted cooperation. The Advisors' reports and speeches analyzed the current situation and problems facing Guangdong in her international competition. Their views are objective and are of great value to us. All these have proved that the Advisors have furthered their understanding of Guangdong by taking part in this Conference. Quite a number of Advisors have shared with us without reservation their experience and strategies in running their organizations, which are of huge benefit to us. In the mean time, we have shared with them our thoughts, plans and beliefs on Guangdong's development. Through such communication and brain-storming, we have deepened understanding, built on our friendship and promoted cooperation. Many Advisors have expressed willingness to strengthen cooperation with Guangdong. For instance, Emerson has a plan to "make Guangdong the prime area for their investment in china"; SANYO believes that "Guangdong is their largest business base in China, and in the future, they will develop logistics, finance and housing in the province"; EDF hopes to enlarge electricity cooperation with Guangdong; Siemens expects to play a bigger role in Guangdong in terms of infrastructure construction, while both Shell and Honda have plans to actively push forward their current projects in Guangdong.

Taking this chance and with the help of the news media, I would like to, once again, express our most sincere thanks to the Advisors for their hard work and the great experience and wisdom they have shared with us here in Guangdong. In the meantime, my sincere thanks also go to our friends from the media who have been working hard in covering this Conference.