I am delivering a speech today to this distinguished audience for three reasons, one of which is that last May I spoke about our region in the Middle East and the vicinity, while this meeting today is discussing an urgent issue of an international nature that concerns everyone.

The second reason is that the period between my first speech in 2001 and today has witnessed great changes - some of which were expected and some unexpected - with major global impact.

The third reason is the fact that this meeting is taking place in China, the giant that regained its strength and has become a huge international player in business and politics. China is also unique in its development. China also has a special place among us Muslims and Arabs when in the 7th century our ancestors encouraged us to seek knowledge even if it was in China, as they realised its importance and the necessity of following its sources, even if it were in a remote area in the world of old. Our ancestors also wanted to respect the scientific achievements in China, in the areas of printing, the production of paper, the invention of gun powder, the compass, as well as the first to devise advanced systems in agriculture, administration, navigation and financial dealings.

And since the time Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasids in the 9th century, sent an ambassador to the Chinese capital of those days, bilateral relations developed and were strengthened. The Silk Road extending from China to Western Asia and the Arab world became the main road for international trade and Arab merchants were for centuries the link between Asia and Europe.

The ancient Chinese capital Chang'an was a cosmopolitan global capital where different nationalities and religions lived together in peace and harmony, and where more than 100,000 Arab, Persian, Indian, Turk, Korean and Bengali merchants worked.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world without an active Chinese presence is inadequate. No doubt the strong presence of China and other Asian countries in the international arena enriches our world and nourishes its variety, expands its economy, its markets and enhances security and stability.

When you strive through this forum to create strong platforms for interaction between conventional players and new ones in the international arena, or between East and West, as indicated in the forum's papers, you are touching upon a sensitive and important chord of cooperation between big international players. This is a tense issue that is highly fraught with uncertainty and has not been adjusted to the desired level of the interaction and mutual effect on major economies. We witnessed another example of this weakness when joint international efforts were absent and did not take care of the market disturbance in August. And if it were not for the intervention of several governments, there would have been a huge crisis with unpredictable results in terms of its negative impact on the world economy.

Two weeks ago I noticed an announcement by an Australian real estate financing group that said it was unable to refinance $5 billion in debts as a result of restrictions on US real estate loans. The crisis in the US with a direct effect on Australia, which is thousands of kilometres away; is there a better example to the extent of interconnections between international economies?

Ladies and gentlemen, let us go back to the post-cold war years of the 1990s and let us recall the historical moments filled with great expectations at the birth of a new world order, where different cultures co-exist, and its different forces cooperate to achieve peace, security and development. Let us remember the optimism as expressed by UN conferences concerns learning, the climate, the population, women's issues and others.

Where are we today after this optimism? What has been achieved in the development area, the environment, combating diseases, and poverty?

No doubt there has been a degree of progress, and that a number of economies have achieved growth, but the big picture is filled with dark corners that reflect our grave challenges. The first of these challenges is the one related to building a knowledge economy which in reality decides the advancement achieved in countries, its continuity or otherwise. Learning here plays a pivotal and basic role; hence the development of any country is related to the educational level of its people, which explains the international concern and interest in this field, as well as the educational leap witnessed in China and India. In these two countries alone, 950,000 engineers graduated this year.
To us in the UAE, after we got our independence in the seventies we have greatly increased the number of educated people.

On the 2nd of December 1971, there were only 45 university graduates in the UAE. Today, UAE university degree holders are in the tens of thousands. The number of university affiliates in our country is similar to the number of university students in developed countries. The percentage of females in universities is 92 per cent, which is the highest in the world. We are currently emphasising on the quality of education to give our youth the necessary skills for the age of knowledge.

Several parts of our world face tremendous difficulties in building knowledge economies, and it will be pertinent to point out that the UN's target for the third millennium in offering primary education for every single child on earth by 2015 may not be achieved until 2050.

Any soil infested with poverty, ignorance and international neglect is always a good breeding ground for fundamentalism.

If we want to be heroes of progress we cannot ignore poverty, which pushes for separation from the wide spectrum of human development. It is not enough that we continue stressing the fact that education is the best and strongest weapon in breaking the cycle of poverty, despair and fundamentalism. We have to offer weapons to the prisoners of this vicious circle and help them to use it as well.

The second world challenge I see is the continuity of development. Development with declining natural resources is an important issue. It is a great challenge for cities no matter how close or far they are from one another, such as Beijing, Delhi and New York. This is a complex problem; it entails energy security, limited oil reserve, access to water, achieving national ambitions, to political priorities and economic policies, to personal options in consumption and recycling. We have to produce more and consume less, we have to allocate resources and make more efforts. We have to cooperate to find alternative resources.

Ladies and gentlemen, the third challenge facing our world is the most important one in the light of international relations.

We all have to take on our responsibilities in spreading forgiveness and acceptance between different nations, cultures, people and ethnic groups.

The challenges we share are not problems related to this country or that, or to this culture or that, or religion. Our human competency is measured by our ability to work successfully together, and search for appropriate solutions according to the "win for all" equation.

There is no alternative to working together. The international reality has changed fundamentally, and with it, the basis of business and political relations has changed fundamentally. Whatever was possible in the past does not necessarily mean it is valid for the future. Violence and physical struggles are useless today, while wars have lost their ability to put a final end to issues. All these historical changes have not reflected totally on international relations. Ghosts from the cold war era pop up their heads from time to time and the degree of trust between the big players goes up and down. These big players look as if they are in an offensive rather than in a cooperation mode.
The international arena is still elastic in its border. This arena stretches or shrinks according the big competitors' interests, calculations and ambitions. It also has substantial space for illegal competition and tools that defy time.

Naturally, it was impossible to reach this situation without reasons, and probably one of the most important reasons is the stubborn resistance put forth by fanatic schools of thought and a variety of interests in this era.

The stubborn ones belong to a different world than ours, they try unsuccessfully to stop progress, and they think wrongly that they can stop the process of history.  Likewise, there are those who advocate the clash of civilisations, they are terrorists and fundamentalists in thought and deed, and they build walls - material, geographic or spiritual - between people and cultures to gain materially or politically.

Fundamentalists are a group with each faction feeding off the other. These factions depend on one another to publicise their causes and justify their crimes.

The new heroes your esteemed forum would like to hear about are the ones who stand in the face of this fundamentalist coalition, and they are the ones working to revive the high hopes of the early 1990s by widening the channels of dialogue between East and West and dispersing the spirit of acceptance and forgiveness.

Those are the people building international partnerships in a world governed by peaceful competition, accomplishments, creativity and cooperation in solving climate problems, poverty and disease.

Ladies and gentlemen, the knowledge revolution gives states, cities and companies the right to win in the arena of international competition, and to be part of the heroes list. I am optimistic about the future; I believe there will be a bigger and deeper international cooperation in all areas. The knowledge era, which embraces human activities, is an excellent rational age. Wherever there is a brain, there are solutions, and wherever there is reality, illusions disappear.

In our regional role, we set an example to one billion and a half people, in the context of continuous development, modern and diverse economy and creative cooperation between the best expertise from the East and West.

To back up this role and to enhance it, we have established the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for Human Development, with a budget of $10 billion to raise awareness and disseminate knowledge in Arab and Islamic societies, and to help the people in the region acquire the knowledge age skills. We are also on the way to establishing academic institutes that encourages creativity to answer the needs of our youth, and for those institutes to be the incubators of outstanding youth in the region, to be the leaders of the future. I am happy to inform you that this establishment is on the way of being achieved very soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, your forum's inquiry about the new heroes at the state, country and company levels is an inquiry about the new leaders. The age of knowledge paves the way for speedy economic, political, social and cultural changes, which usually needs leaderships that are aware of the nature of change and its deep imprints. They help in enhancing the chances of continuous development, social unity, security and stability on the national and international levels.

From my personal experience, building a youthful leadership with a renewable vision of its roles in government and in the private sector is an initial and absolute requisite for continuous development, progress and turning plans and projects, dreams and new ideas into important achievements on the ground.

It is my personal responsibility to build generations of youthful leaderships open to new ideas and the changing world and diversity, it would not have been possible to realise our achievements witnessed by the world without having the will to change what is theoretical to practical, and to get to know the best practices in the world, to learn from the different international experiences, successful and unsuccessful experiences and experiments.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to request all participants, whether from the government or private sector or any other sector, to support building generations of highly qualified new leaders to face the new challenges in the constantly changing international power balance - a leadership that believes in joint efforts to achieve our goals in the spirit of human advancement.