Honorable Minister Heng, Distinguished EC colleagues and Director Nemoto,

Good morning, it is my great honor to join the Opening Ceremony of AMRO International Organization. Upgrading to an IO is a milestone event for East Asian financial cooperation process, and marks a significant stride of AMRO towards a new stage of development. On behalf of the Chinese Government, I would like to extend our sincere congratulations on AMRO’s operation as an IO. At the same time, I would also like to express sincere thanks to all ASEAN +3 members, particularly Singapore as the host country, as well as Doctor Nemoto and all AMRO colleagues for your great efforts and contribution in this process.

AMRO’s upgrading to an IO demonstrates once again our firm political will of deepening East Asian financial cooperation and collectively rising to the challenges. With all members’ joint efforts, our regional financial cooperation has made many important achievements over the years. Since ASEAN+3 members officially kicked off our regional financial cooperation by signing the Chiang Mai Initiative Agreement in May 2000, we multilateralized the Chiang Mai Initiative, and built up a self-managed reserve pool to act as a funding mechanism for crisis rescue, with its size gradually increasing from initially 80 billion USD to 240 billion USD today.

Meanwhile, to support the operation of CMIM, members established AMRO as the regional economic surveillance unit in April 2011. Under the leadership of then Director Benhua Wei and Director Nemoto, AMRO’s surveillance capacity has been enhanced steadily and provided effective support to CMIM’s operation.

While the East Asian Financial Safety Net is taking shape, its usability and effectiveness need to be further enhanced and tested in practice. In the context of monetary policy normalization of the Fed, disorderly international capital flows, and volatile global financial market, it is extremely important and urgent to further strengthen the East Asian Financial Safety Net, in order to maintain regional economic and financial stability.

AMRO, as an indispensable component of the East Asian Financial Safety Net, should: first, further strengthen the capacity of economic surveillance and risk detection, and provide high-quality policy suggestions for ASEAN+3 members; second, further support the effective operation of CMIM, facilitate the discussion of ASEAN+3 members on refining CMIM, and enhance AMRO’s role in crisis management; third, provide higher quality technical assistance in macroeconomic management and crisis prevention, in order to narrow the gap among members; fourth, build AMRO into a high-standard international organization by further enhancing AMRO’s institutional capacity, improving AMRO’s internal management system of human resources, budgeting and external communication, and building a high-quality staff team. I am glad to see that a new AMRO senior management team will be formed soon and expect this new team to lead AMRO to make greater achievements.

Dear colleagues, China has been actively participating in and promoting East Asian financial cooperation. China highly values the role of AMRO in the region and will work closely with ASEAN+3 members to step up support to AMRO. I believe that with our concerted efforts, we can build AMRO into a professional, responsive, effective and reliable economic surveillance organization which will play a greater role in maintaining regional economic and financial stability and promoting macroeconomic policy dialogues among ASEAN+3 members.

Thank you!