CIRSD President Vuk Jeremić attended the prestigious China Development Forum (CDF), held annually at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, as a special guest of the organizers alongside former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Robert Rubin, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. Treasury Secretary.
The three-day annual gathering is the flagship annual conference of the Development Research Center of the China State Council whose President (Minister) is Li Wei, a member of the CIRSD Board of Advisors.
For close to two decades, the CDF has served as an important venue for senior members of the Chinese leadership to present fresh policy economic decisions to leading members of the global business and financial community.
This year, high-level international participants at the CDF included IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, as well as more than 100 international corporate heads including those from BP, Blackstone, Bloomberg, Caterpillar, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nestlé, Pfizer, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens, and TOTAL, amongst many others. Also attending were nearly 250 senior Chinese officials and business leaders.
CIRSD President Vuk Jeremić chaired a keynote panel entitled “Enhancing Connectivity and Building the ‘One Belt, One Road’.” The panel featured a speech by Jin Liqun, the Secretary-General of the multilateral body tasked with establishing the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in which he outlined the AIIB’s ambitious plans to enhance connectivity throughout Asia. The panel also featured remarks by, amongst others, President and CEO of Saudi Aramco Khalid Al-Falih, Global Managing Director of McKinsey & Co. Dominic Barton, and President and CEO of MasterCard Ajay Banga.
“It’s a tremendous honor to participate in one of the most influential global platforms for international debate on critical issues concerning China’s and the world’s development and cooperation strategies,” Jeremić said. “In our panel, we discussed the strategic framework of the new Silk Road initiative, which, if realized, would represent the greatest infrastructural endeavor in human history; it has the potential to fundamentally transform the politics and economics of globalization in the 21st century,” Jeremić said.
On the margins of the CDF, Jeremić also met with China’s Premier Li Keqiang and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Accompanying CIRSD President Vuk Jeremić to the CDF were CIRSD Executive Director Zdravko Ponoš and CIRSD Senior Fellow Damjan Krnjević Mišković.
