Twelve nations established the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group in 1989.\u00a0Bob Hawke of Australia called for effective economic cooperation within the region. \u00a0Canberra hosted the first meeting.\u00a0 Bill Clinton followed it with a leaders meeting on Blake between Vashon and Bainbridge islands of the Puget Sound west of Seattle, Washington State.\u00a0 APEC was to temper the expected economic growth of China, the awakened tiger of the east.\u00a0\u00a0Member \u201ceconomies\u201d as opposed to countries seek to promote free trade and economic cooperation, focusing on trade liberalization and business facilitation.\u00a0 The beat on economies rather than political units allow Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong to sit around the same table as separate entities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The group\u2019s leaders meeting this year is hosted in Honolulu Nov. 12-13, with President Obama of the U.S. and President Hu Jintao of China in attendance.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Barrack Hussein Obama II is Good Morning America\u2019s surprise with a meteoric rise after keynoting the Democratic Party at the Party convention of 2004, becoming the 44th President in 2009, overcoming the popular Party stalwart and frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and the challenge of folk hero GOP Senator John McCain of the Hanoi Hilton fame in the national elections.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Obama defied all kinds of limits.\u00a0He is the first president of African-American descent, born in Hawaii to a Kansas Caucasian English-Irish mother and a Lou Kenyan foreign student father who met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.\u00a0 Obama characterized his parents as \u201cwhite as milk and black as pitch,\u201d they united before the Supreme court struck the Virginia Anti-miscegenation statute (1967) and decreed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 unconstitutional.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Obama grew up in Indonesia with Muslim public school playmates, attended the elite prep school of Punahou in Honolulu, studied at Occidental College in L.A., transferred to Columbia for PolySci and International relations for a B.A., and later to Harvard to become a civil rights lawyer, after a stint in a Southside Chicago community organizing ala Saul Alinsky.\u00a0Crafting a mainstream course, Obama attracts the worst traits of the American political spectrum but capturing the long term hopes and dreams of a nation that earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2009.\u00a0<\/p>\n
President Hu Jintao is a practical technocrat, the first of China\u2019s leaders without militant revolutionary credentials.\u00a0 He was Communist Party secretary in Guizhou and the Xizang (Tibet) Autonomous Region before becoming first Secretary of the CPC Secretariat and Vice-President under former leader Jiang Zemin.\u00a0With amiable and genial colleague Premier Wen Jiabao, they presided over a period of consistent economic growth that has since catapulted China as a major world power.\u00a0 Hu and his colleagues in the Politburo are children of the scientific era making its methods the basis of cognition and planning for the future, yet Sino-rooted to adopt a \u2018harmonious society\u2019 without invoking the superstitious luggage of the practices of taiji\/yin-yang in their ancestry.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Hu\u2019s pursuit of peaceful development adopted a soft power approach in international relations and a business oriented bent on diplomacy. Hu projects the image of a clean and trustworthy communal face.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope and the award-winning following of his campaign slogan Yes We Can, gives him high ratings in imagination, communication ability and intelligence among US Presidents, ranking 15 out of 43 in a poll of some 280 presidential scholars.\u00a0 Obama projects the image of lucid and dependable self-conscious personality.<\/p>\n
\u00a0It is this image difference, the face of harmony of one and the persona of hope of the other that saw the lime lights of Waikiki this weekend, learned to dance the graciousness of the hula, and the all encompassing spirit of the aloha.\u00a0 Personal differences are stylistic rather than substantive but both represent traditions with heavy structural luggage, and it is the attendant systems of the nations they represent that kept them apart when the two man would have gravitated naturally towards each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hu Jintao\u2019s term in office ends next year, colleague Wen Jiabao, the next.\u00a0\u00a0The helms of the nation is being turned over to a younger generation of leaders and the patterns of the last decade is not expected to change drastically as opposed to the political convulsions now being witnessed in the free market economies.\u00a0Obama, on the other hand, faces a nation that had voted him into office hoping for a quick fix on everything, only to turn around quickly to put barriers on any initiatives he takes, fearful that it be too drastic, yet the man counts among his mentors the barefoot Galilean who reportedly responded to a man waiting for a messianic turn at miraculous waters:\u00a0 \u201cYou want to be well?\u00a0 Well, just pick up your bed and walk!\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s speech at the CEO Summit played to his domestic audience, essentially asking China to play by the rules without mentioning that the global rules the market economies have been playing with has earned the world hollow phantom wealth that collapsed on its own illusory weight.\u00a0 Hu manly smiled his way through the forum, reminding one and all that China\u2019s economy is far from balanced and sustainable, perhaps, heeding his own ancient ancestors\u2019 tart advice:\u00a0 \u201cdon\u2019t be too humble \u2018cause you are not great, yet!\u201d<\/p>\n
The issue is neither China or the U.S.\u00a0The issue is glocal humanity.\u00a0As the world turns, Obama and Hu will be the Man, and we will just aim to let the Main streets of the world, unite!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Twelve nations established the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group in 1989.\u00a0Bob Hawke of Australia called for effective economic cooperation within the region. \u00a0Canberra hosted the first meeting.\u00a0 Bill Clinton followed it with a leaders meeting on Blake between Vashon and Bainbridge islands of the Puget Sound west of Seattle, Washington State.\u00a0 APEC was to temper the expected economic growth of China, the awakened tiger of the east.\u00a0\u00a0Member \u201ceconomies\u201d as opposed to countries seek to promote free trade and economic cooperation, focusing on trade liberalization and business facilitation.\u00a0 The beat on economies rather than political units allow Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong to sit around the same table as separate entities.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}