3月25日，在亚洲青年领袖论坛开幕式上，马来西亚总理安瓦尔·易卜拉欣 通过视频发表重要讲话。

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, my dear youth, I commend you for supporting this endeavour to combine the forces of young Asians. And it is always fruitful to have leaders exchanging their views and learning from each other's experience. And from my personal reflections and experience, I find this very significant. You learn much more from such interactions because we actually come from different cultural backgrounds, political backgrounds, and only through such interaction we can understand and appreciate one another. Well, during our days was more against colonialism and imperialism, and not only in terms of the sheer arrogance of power and control, but it's also an insidious attempt to influence the thinking, the mindset, and our values. Look at how we understand our cultures. We always feel the West is superior. We always were told that in order to progress, you must be one of them. But we realize that this can't be the case. We started looking at our own experience, our own history, our own contributions of our forefathers. 

And with this, you must understand it is a different period. It is not on the period of ChatGPT or ERNIE Bot or WhatsApp and all these more sophisticated social media network. It is all through reading, through pamphleteering, in order to preserve our identity. And of course, even understanding China, we see it from the prism of the West. But then things began to change. And we start understanding the values, that history cannot be dictated by the then Western superpower. And I first viewed this with interest. For example, when President Xi Jinping said that when faced with a complex world economy and the issue of globalization, no country can act alone. It is interesting because globalization is not a new phenomena. China was a center of global civilization. The Middle East was a center of global civilization. Even us in Malaysia, during the Malacca Sultanate, it was also in a different sense a center of international trade and therefore globalization. So the whole thinking starts to shift from this narrow, Western mindset. Now, if you look at history, I recall what T.S. Eliot's succinct reminder to us, that history, it depends how we interpret. History can be servitude, or history may be freedom. Of course we choose freedom.

I will leave the historical struggles and dissidence, but we somehow come up from the same tribulations, having to deal with, as I said, the old colonial attitude and aggression. But things have changed. And we now are independent as we do realize, the level of sophistication, new technology, digitalization have of course shifted our mindset, either we’re local, but also global in many sense. But we should never leave the forces, the vast legacy, our own legacy and knowledge, because there must be some ingrained wisdom that we need to acquire. In the San Guo Zhi, Records of the Three Kingdoms or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, we are told that an act of evil, no matter how small, must be shunned. While an act of kindness, no matter how trivial, is worth performing. Very similar to the Islamic understanding of always trying to do good, promote goodness and care for humanitarian ideals and compassion in our world. So thank you again for this opportunity. I, of course, encourage you to continue this endeavor and thank the Chinese authorities for giving youth the opportunity to engage and to utilize through exchanges, reading, research and understanding because a conference is only a catalyst for broadening our horizons.