 Grafwyd i'n ddigwydd yr unig. A ddilyn i chi'n f Churchill yn enwedig y gallwn ymddangos gyda chi. Mae'n fydig i fi gaf ar hon i. Mae'n ddigwydd i chi'n ddigwydd i chi'n ddigwydd ar y prosiect i'r hyfforddiad, ac dyna i'r ei ddweud ei gwybwch yn ymddangos ythafell ar roeddaeth. Mae'n ddigwydd i chi'n ddigwydd i chi weld ei gwybwch ar eich ddweud eich ddweud felly i chi inverwyddol yn chynwyd yn Cynllun. A ti'n gwneud yn yw'r hollwch yn eu bodysig ar y cyhoeddiad. I was an official in Beijing at the British Embassy in 2001 and I remember at that time China was just finalising its negotiations to join the World Trade Organization after 14, 15 years of long, long debate and kind of very, very complicated negotiations with the US and then with the EU. And it's sort of interesting to think that's 10 years, you know, November, I think was the November, the beginning of December was when it was finalised, what our assessment was at that time and what's actually happened in that 10 years. In fact, I was looking at the Economist and other newspapers in 2001 the other day and they were surprisingly gloomy, sort of saying China's going to open up its domestic industries to a lot of very fierce competition. Its agricultural sector, which was after all, nearly a quarter of its GDP then, was going to be very fundamentally challenged by the liberalisation of tariffs and the opening up of the sort of domestic market. And, you know, the assessments were in the long term optimistic, but thinking that in China would be really kind of, you know, challenged and in some ways would probably come out of this maybe a little worse off than it expected, the political objective to join the WTO. Was clear that China would be part of the global economic and eventually political community, but certainly the economic kind of gains were more difficult to sort of re-fortell. Well, we're 10 years on from there and I think we can say that what 2001 did do, which we didn't expect so profoundly was to unleash forces of productivity so that we stand now with China, the world's biggest importer and exporter, the world's second biggest economy, the world's biggest holder of foreign reserves and a whole sort of list of things, you know, if it's not number one, it's number two or number three. So this has been quite an extraordinary transformation. China has become more quickly than I think we expected and as official I didn't expect this so quickly, more successfully than we probably expected this enormous economy. Since 2001 it's tripled. Maybe quadrupled the size of its economy when you think of the kind of immense sort of factory like growth of its GDP. This is an extraordinary thing, but it's also for its leadership, the elite leadership who are now going to go through a transition over the next 12 months to a fifth generation leadership. It has also created some profound socio-economic, socio-political challenges from, you could say from 1949 when the Communist Party was victorious in the civil war until 1978 during the period of Maoism, state-directed economy, kind of borrowed from the Soviet Union, kind of era, I suppose of, you know, really the key thing was to sort of stabilize society but to do it through these enormous campaigns like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. And these had huge social costs, huge social costs. The country was united, that's true, however the costs were immense. From 1978 to 90s till today you could say that the one thing that the elite leadership have said and the ministries under them have said is, you know, you take economic production as the key thing. It said all the congresses, it was said by Hu Jindhal in 2007, it said during the National People's Congress, this is the one thing that every one kind of agrees with. Economic productivity is the key thing, this is where we have performed, I mean the kind of performative legitimacy of the party. But really in the last couple of years more strongly, particularly people like Wenja Baill, the current Premier, you see this kind of talk of we need to think much more about socio-political outcomes, how to create more justice in society, how to have more balance, how to deal with equality, these kind of things because it is a very unequal society at the moment, although there is huge, you know, kind of productivity and prosperity. So this is the kind of policy advice that we are giving, the context China is undertaking enormously challenging transitional decisions. It is taking them with a new leadership, it is taking them at a time when it is globally more prominent than it has ever been before, in a way more quickly than it thought it would have to take it. And the whole idea of setting up this academic network is because of course we need to be part of that. China's internal issues are in fact global ones, what happens in its 31 provinces and autonomous regions are things that affect us. If it has problems with its science supply chain, well it's a big exporter, it absolutely impacts on us. And so really we are trying to gather as much expertise on as many areas as possible throughout Europe to make sure that our policy makers in the European External Action Service and the member states have policy which is informed by good analysis, by good empirical studies and by knowledge. I mean policy informed by knowledge is obviously probably more successful than policy informed by wishful thinking. Basically to get involved, I mean just to sort of explain a little bit about the project, it's funded obviously by the European Union, we started work in January this year, so only nine months old. And as I've just said the key thing that we want to do is to have European policy makers make available to them the best kind of analysis about the political, economic and social issues in China at the moment. The consortium that we're involved with, Steinbeis in Germany, the Galway Development Service International who are here today, the University of Nottingham and Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. We have the key areas that we focus on are economics, politics and society. The three things that we really do, it's actually put up there as four, but I mean really the three things that we do as part of our fundamental job are to do short briefs on a number of issues, we've done them on international affairs for China, we've done them on economic issues, we've done them on current internal issues in China like social protest, these kinds of things. These are delivered to the Commission every month, really analysing by a key expert what is happening and these experts are any of our 250 network at the moment across Europe. The second thing we do in fact Jeremy and Henric today are doing this at the moment, we are working on long papers so this year they'll be published on our website but we're doing papers on Chinese investment into the EU, Chinese investment into the greater European area which is largely Russian Turkey. Chinese EU relations where they'll be by 2020, China and the US and the EU, these papers we publicly publish, we publish commissioning bids so people can bid for them, so this is a very good way for people to become involved. And then basically the final thing we do is events, events like the event that you are at today. The easiest way to get involved is through our website, there's a kind of form there that people fill in and it's a rather bureaucratic way but I mean I think it means that you are then part of our network, it's an inclusive network, we want to involve as many people as possible across the member states and it sets out very clearly on our website what kind of things we're doing. We would love to hear ideas, you've already become part of our network because you're attending this event today, we're a bit like a sort of secret sect in a way, once you get touched by us we won't let you go, wherever you go we'll try and sort of make sure that you're included. Today's sort of objective really, first of all it's great to be able to continue this relationship with the IEA in Dublin, it's fantastic, your support has really been appreciated. And the second thing really is to sort of give a taste of the sort of research that we've been commissioning and that Jeremy and Henry will do to sort of really show you the kind of things we're looking at, the fresh research we're doing. And the sort of third thing is really to create a dialogue to see what one of the key member states in the European Union, the kind of expertise here, the interest in China here would be. And just finally before we kick off, I think there's one statistic that I think always kind of stays with me, my former boss in Beijing, the British ambassador there in I think 2002, I remember when he arrived at the embassy he sort of made this talk where he said the first time he'd come to China was in 1971 and he said on that day the only way that you could enter China as a European was through Hong Kong into what became Shenzhen but was at that time a small fishing village. Now it's a city of 10 million people and that day the only people that entered China, all of China from Europe was three people. Between 1949 and 1978, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, there were something like 750,000 people movements between China and the outside world. People leaving and coming back, people visiting and departing from that whole of that time, nearly three decades, only 750,000. The last year that I have statistics for in 2006, 46 million in one year. So you can see there the kind of incredible increase, the fact that we do have to have our kind of knowledge used, we do have to be aware of this sort of enormous transformation that is happening with China becoming more and more prominent. We need to embrace that and to be able to have a strategy as I think we were talking about earlier, a strategy to deal with it, to work together to find areas of common interest. The areas where obviously we disagree but these are natural things in any dialogue but we really want to make sure that our policy makers who after all have really opened their doors to this project are given the best possible advice and the best possible analysis so that they can then do something with it.