President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Juan Antonio Samaranch has expressed his wishes for the Chinese people in the upcoming new century.

In a brief interview with Xinhua in Lausanne Monday, December 4, on the sidelines of the IOC World Conference on Sport and New Media, Samaranch asked China's official news agency, one of the participants at the conference, to convey his "best wishes to my friends and the people in the People's Republic of China".

"I hope that in the new century China will have a bright future in sports and economic development," he said.

The 80-year-old IOC president also wishes Beijing, one of the five cities bidding the 2008 Olympic Games, good luck. He said that the new media and the Internet would have a tremendous positive impact on the promotion of sport and the Olympic movement.

He did not rule out the possibility that the capability of the broad-band new media would become one of the factors which might affect the decision of the final host city of the 2008 games.

The other four cities are Istanbul of Turkey, Osaka of Japan, Paris of France, and Toronto of Canada.

(People's Daily 12/05/2000)