Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji and U.S. Vice-President Al Gore reaffirmed in Washington DC on April 9, 1999 that China and the United States will continue to work together for the protection of the global environment.

Zhu and Gore made the reaffirmation at the second session of the China-U.S. Forum on Environment and Development.

"Environment and development are major issues of general interest of the international community today and how to protect the ecological environment on which mankind depends for subsistence and development, while developing the economy, has become a pressing and arduous task facing the people across the world," Zhu said when speaking at the meeting.

He said China and the United States held the first session of the forum in Beijing in 1997. Over the past two years, he said, the two countries have conducted extensive exchanges and cooperation in various fields covered in the forum and made positive progress in this regard.

Zhu said that at this session the two countries will review the progress made during the last two years, share experience and look into the future. "This will be of great significance to increase mutual beneficial cooperation between our two sides to meet the challenges of the new century," he added.

Zhu said China will use more clean energy so as to protect the environment better. To do that, he said, the government need to restructure the economy and to use more natural gas and other clean energy and oil.

Since the 1980s, China and the United States have indeed conducted very productive cooperation in environment protection, especially in 1997, when Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited the United States and the two countries signed the initiative on environment and development.

During U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit to China last year, China and the United States signed a letter of intent for the urban air quality monitoring between the two sides, thus further deepening the bilateral cooperation.

Gore, who co-sponsored the first session of the forum with then Chinese Premier Li Peng when he visited China in March 1997, said today that the United States and China have a very strong interest in working together to find ways to solve the environment problem, which also allow the two countries to continue the economic progress.

"We have gathered some of the best minds from both of our countries, and we have asked them to work together to find new ways to achieve our common goals," he said.

Gore said that the United States and China are a world apart, and so much of "our work together must," therefore, inevitably be done long-distance. "That should make us appreciate all the more the opportunity for today's face-to-face meetings, an uncommon opportunity, which we should seize, to move forward toward a cleaner, brighter and better future for both of our peoples," he said.

At the first session of the forum, China and the United States agreed to strengthen their cooperation in energy and environment through an initiative to accelerate clean energy projects and the appropriate transfer of related technologies.

Besides, China's State Planning Commission and the U.S. Energy Department signed the China-U.S. initiative on energy and environment cooperation to promote effective cooperation in these fields, including the use of clean energy.

Zhu arrived in the United States Tuesday for an eight-day official visit to the country, the first by a Chinese premier in 15 years.