In an address recorded in Seoul, South Korea, the President discusses his trip to Asia. He talks about his push to stop nuclear proliferation in North Korea, Iran, and around the world. He talks about promoting America's principles for an open society in China while making progress on joint efforts to combat climate change. And talks in-depth about the primary objective of his trip: engaging in new markets that hold tremendous potential to spur job creation here at home.
President Barack Obama returns from his maiden Asian swing with none of the concrete accomplishments that White Houses typically put in place before big trips, setting up a stark test for his idealistic theory that the United States should act more like a wise neighbor than a swaggering superpower.
Obama’s minimalist approach was most consequential in China, where he did not meet with Christians, dissidents or bloggers, or directly challenge his hosts for repressive tactics that are again on the rise.
The Chinese in turn rebuffed longstanding U.S. concerns – whether on human rights, Iran or currency policy – in a heavily stage-managed visit where China, not Obama, clearly sought the upper hand.
It’s an approach that carries great risk for Obama – playing straight into his critics’ accusations that his new, more multilateral style isn’t paying dividends, and worse, is making him look weak and ineffectual abroad.
“They don’t want this narrative that the U.S. is a declining power and China is a rising power, and the trip just reinforced that,” said Adam Segal, a senior fellow on China at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The sense of the trip was, ‘We’re not here to get in their face about these things.’”
Add to that the fact the main image of Obama abroad that really broke through to the American public out of the trip – Obama bowing to the Japanese emperor – didn’t exactly reinforce the image of a muscular leader abroad.
But there were substantive problems as well. An early test drive of Obama’s policy of engaging rivals and adversaries around the globe suffered a setback Wednesday, when Iran defied Washington and rejected a United Nations call for the regime to send enriched uranium abroad for processing, which would inhibit the building of nuclear weapons.
That plan was sort of Obama’s ace-in-the-hole for dealing with Iran – and success would have been vindication for his approach to talk to the Iranian regime “without preconditions,” as he said during the campaign. Now Obama is roughly back where President George W. Bush often found himself, trying to rally world support to crack down on an intransigent Iran.
Ironically, the disappointment did give Obama a chance to show he has a spine. At his final diplomatic event of the trip, a two-question news conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Obama sounded like a stern parent when he said: “We have begun discussions with our international partners about the importance of having consequences.”
Through it all, the White House says it’s not concerned.
After the press conference, U.S. reporters surrounded White House senior adviser David Axelrod, who said the goal of the trip “was to lay a foundation for economic progress, to open up markets for American goods, to lay a foundation for progress on mutual security issues…to lay groundwork on climate change.”
“Though the President is demonstrably popular in all these countries and polling reflects that, we didn't come halfway across the world for ticker-tape parades,” Axelrod said. “So we believe it was a successful trip.”
In “key points” on the trip provided to reporters, a senior administration official contended: “American leadership was absent from this region for the last several years, despite the fact that it is increasingly central to our economic growth and our security. President Obama put our alliances on a firmer footing, reasserted our leadership in the region, and continued to advance a complicated bilateral relationship with China that will play a large role in shaping the 21st century.”
Axelrod said the White House recognized “didn't have expectations that Barack Obama arrives in China or anywhere else and things change overnight.”
“This is not an immediate gratification business,” Axelrod said. “I understand that Washington is in the immediate gratification business. … [T]he ultimate measure is where these issues -- how these issues resolve in the weeks and months and years to come. And we have a greater chance for success because of this trip and others he's made.”
But the formulation puts the White House in the awkward position of promising results down the road. It wasn’t just the lack of hard results, but the tone of Obama’s remarks, even passing up opportunity to speak out more vocally against the repressive Chinese regime.
At a “town meeting” with students in Shanghai, for instance, Obama avoided directly challenging the Chinese for blocking Twitter from the Web. Instead, Obama declared: “I'm a big supporter of non-censorship.”
Segal said that while the trip succeeding on the White House’s terms of sending a message of cooperation, Obama might have given a plain-spoken answer to the Twitter question, along the lines of: “I think the Chinese government is hurting itself.”
Still, several national-security veterans agreed that the White House press corps had unrealistic expectations for the trip. Douglas H. Paal, a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the reporters traveling with Obama seemed to think he should “punch [Chinese President] Hu Jintao in the nose.”
Paal, who was on the National Security Council staffs of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said Obama succeeded by reassuring other Asian nations – including during his other three stops in Singapore, South Korea and Japan – that the U.S. will serve as a counterbalance to China.
That was the administration’s “We’re back” message. And many foreign policy experts are giving Obama high marks for patience. Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, has been able to establish a “new rapport with China – a relationship of almost parity.”
Cronin said Obama “asked for something from each country, but also showed the United States will make compromises and recognize our own limitations and mistakes.”
“He’s not pointing a finger,” Cronin said. “Conservative critics will say he gave too much away. But Asia is about relationship-building. This first trip was a good investment. He’s playing a strategic game, not just a tactical one. It creates problems if others misperceive this as weakness.”
Minxin Pei, a well-known specialist on U.S.-China relations who joined Claremont McKenna College last summer, said Obama missed an opportunity by not insisting that the town hall in Shanghai be nationally televised, and calling the Chinese government’s bluff by threatening to cancel the event.
“Unlike previous American presidents, Obama went to Asia with a lot of baggage: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and domestic difficulties,” Pei said. “As a result, he had much less leverage. The Asians want business, but Uncle Sam is not in the mood for more free trade -- the politics in Washington does not allow that. And with sky-high deficits, Obama cannot promise anything else. So he carries neither a stick nor a carrot. It is not a good position to be.”
Pei sees a possible silver lining for the White House. “Because the press coverage of his trip is quite bad, it may have caused some heartburn in Beijing,” Pei said. “Chinese leaders know that a good relationship with Obama will be in China's interest. And a weakened Obama cannot manage U.S.-China ties effectively. So there is a chance that China will do something after the trip is over to show that Obama's visit is not fruitless after all.”
(UPDATES: 12:22 p.m. A brief news video has been added below, showing the greeting in this photograph. Contrary to some claims, the video shows no reciprocal bow by the emperor, who traditionally bows to no one. And we've added a file photo from 2007 of Vice President Dick Cheney greeting the Japanese Emperor at the same residence in a different fashion.)
How low will the new American president go for the world's royalty?
This photo will get Democrat President Obama a lot of approving nods in Japan this weekend, especially among the older generation of Japanese who still pay attention to the royal family living in its downtown castle. Very low bows like this are a sign of great respect and deference to a superior.
To some in the United States, however, an upright handshake might have looked better.
Remember Michelle Obama casually patting Britain's Queen Elizabeth on the back during their Buckingham Palace visit? America's royalty tends to make movies and get bad reviews and lots of money as a sign of respect.
Obama could receive some frowns back home as he did for his not-quite-this-low-or-maybe-about-the-same-bow to the Saudi king not so long ago.
How times change under Democratic presidents.
Back in 1994 when President Bill Clinton appeared to maybe perhaps almost start to bow to Akihito at a White House encounter, U.S. officials rushed to deny it was any such a thing. And the N.Y. Times chronicled the comedic drama here.
Akihito, who turns 76 next month, is the eldest son and fifth child of Emperor Showa, the name given to an emperor and his reign after his death.
Emperor Showa is better known abroad by the life name of Hirohito. He became emperor in 1925 and died in 1989, the longest historically-known rule of the nation's 125 emperors.
Hirohito presided over his nation's growth from an undeveloped agrarian economy into the expansionist military power and ally of Nazi Germany of the 1930's.
And, later, Japan became a global economic giant. Hirohito, along with Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who authorized the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, were much reviled abroad during World War II.
Historically debate has simmered over how much of a political puppet Hirohito was to the country's military before and during the war.
Even after Democratic President Harry Truman ordered the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945, there were strong forces within Japan that wanted to continue to fight the Americans in the spirit of kamikaze suicide pilots.
But Akihito's father went on national radio, the first time his subjects had ever heard Hirohito's voice, and without using the inflammatory word "surrender," pronounced that the country must "accept the unacceptable." It did.
As the conquering Allied general and then presiding officer of the U.S. occupation, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, decided to allow Japan to keep its emperor as a ceremonial unifying institution within a nascent democracy.
Tojo, on the other hand, was hanged.
Akihito was born during Japan's conquering of China and was evacuated during the devastating American fire-bombing of Tokyo, which was built largely of wood in those days.
The future emperor learned English during the U.S. occupation, but, inexplicably, his father ordered that his oldest boy not receive an Army commission as previous imperial heirs always had.
Akihito assumed the throne on Jan. 7, 1989. Within weeks he began a series of formal expressions of remorse to Asian countries for Japan's actions during his....
father's reign. In 2003, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer.
In 1959, Akihito married Michiko Shoda, the first commoner allowed to enter the Japanese royal family. That was two years before the birth of Akihito's future presidential guest, Barack Obama.
Now VP Joe Biden was already 17 by then. But he wasn't a senator.
A senior administration official said President Barack Obama was simply observing protocol when he bowed to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko upon arriving at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Saturday.
“I think that those who try to politicize those things are just way, way, way off base,” the official said. “He observes protocol. But I don’t think anybody who was in Japan – who saw his speech and the reaction to it, certainly those who witnesses his bilateral meetings there – would say anything other than that he enhanced both the position and the status of the U.S., relative to Japan. It was a good, positive visit at an important time, because there’s a lot going on in Japan.”
The Drudge Report gave a banner headline to a photo of the encounter: “OBAMA BOWS BEFORE JAPAN’S EMPEROR.” Drudge linked to a Los Angeles Times blog post that headlined the photo: “How low will he go?”That led to a raft of e-mail to POLITICO asking why we weren’t covering this big story.
Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.
While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.
Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.
So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.
There's really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.
The long-term picture for workers and families is even worse than current job loss numbers alone would suggest. Now as a way of sharing the pain, many firms are telling their workers to cut hours, take furloughs and accept lower wages. Specifically, that fall in hours worked is equivalent to another 3 million full time jobs lost on top of the 7.5 million jobs formally lost.
This is very bad news but we must face facts. Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs, finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other countries.
Other measures tell the same ugly story: The average length of unemployment is at an all time high; the ratio of job applicants to vacancies is 6 to 1; initial claims are down but continued claims are very high and now millions of unemployed are resorting to the exceptional extended unemployment benefits programs and are staying in them longer.
Based on my best judgment, it is most likely that the unemployment rate will peak close to 11% and will remain at a very high level for two years or more.
The weakness in labor markets and the sharp fall in labor income ensure a weak recovery of private consumption and an anemic recovery of the economy, and increases the risk of a double dip recession.
As a result of these terribly weak labor markets, we can expect weak recovery of consumption and economic growth; larger budget deficits; greater delinquencies in residential and commercial real estate and greater fall in home and commercial real estate prices; greater losses for banks and financial institutions on residential and commercial real estate mortgages, and in credit cards, auto loans and student loans and thus a greater rate of failures of banks; and greater protectionist pressures.
The damage will be extensive and severe unless bold policy action is undertaken now.
President Barack Obama is walking a tightrope on his first trip to China, seeking to enlist help in tackling urgent global problems while weighing when and how — or if — he should raise traditional human rights concerns.
Obama arrived in Shanghai late at night, in a driving rain, hustling through a phalanx of umbrella-holding dignitaries to reach his limousine. On Monday, the president is holding talks with local politicians and, in one of the marquee events of his weeklong Asian trip, conducting an American-style town hall discussion with Chinese university students.
Thirty years after the start of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the ties are growing — but remain mixed on virtually every front.
The two nations are partnering more than ever on battling global warming, but they still differ deeply over hard targets for reductions in the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause it. China has supported sterner sanctions to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons program, but it still balks at getting more aggressive about reining in Iran's uranium enrichment.
Giant Trade Deficit with U.S.
China is a huge and lucrative market for American goods and services, and yet it has a giant trade deficit with the U.S. that, like a raft of other economic issues, is a bone of contention between the two governments. The two militaries have increased their contacts, but clashes still happen and the U.S. remains worried about a dramatic buildup in what is already the largest standing army in the world.
Amid all that, Obama has adopted a pragmatic approach that stresses the positive, sometimes earning him criticism for being too soft on Beijing, particularly in the area of human rights abuses and what the U.S. regards as an undervalued Chinese currency that disadvantages U.S. products.
Obama recognizes that a rising China, as the world's third-largest economy on the way to becoming the second and the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, has shifted the dynamic more toward one of equals. For instance, Chinese questions about how Washington spending policies will affect the already soaring U.S. deficit and the safety of Chinese investments now must be answered by Washington.
Second, Obama wants not to anger Beijing, but to encourage it to pair its growing economic and political clout with greater leadership in solving some of the most urgent global problems, including a sagging economy, warming planet and the spread of dangerous weapons.
Obama has talked warmly toward China, particularly in the days leading up to his visit.
"The United States does not seek to contain China," Obama said in a speech from Tokyo on Saturday. "On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations."
Human Rights Concerns
One test of the line Obama is walking on China will be human rights, including religious freedom in the officially atheist nation. Aides said in advance that Obama would raise several human rights issues privately with Chinese leaders, including President Hu Jintao.
But it was unlikely he would repeat those messages too stridently in public, out of concern for angering his hosts. Even before arriving in China, for example, he declined to get specific about human rights concerns with China in his Tokyo speech and eschewed the traditional presidential meeting with the Dalai Lama while he was in Washington in June.
Obama said he would see the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader later, a decision welcomed by Chinese officials who pressure foreign governments not to meet with the Dalai Lama and spurn Tibetans' desires for autonomy from Chinese rule.
The White House hoped Monday's town hall meeting with Chinese university students would allow Obama to telegraph U.S. values — through its successes and failures — to the widest Chinese audience possible.
But those hopes will have their limits in communist-ruled, tightly controlled China. The particulars of the town hall, including whether it could even be called one, were the subject of delicate negotiations between the White House and the Chinese up to the last minute. It remained unclear, for instance, whether — and how broadly — it would be broadcast on television and how much of a hand the central government had in choosing those allowed to question the U.S. President.
Will visit noted Landmarks
Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama would call at random on several of those in the audience, to be made up of hundreds of students hand-picked by the department heads of Shanghai-area universities, and would also answer questions solicited in advance by the White House from "various sources on the Internet."
Even if the event is only aired on China's main English-language TV channel, which has very few viewers, the White House will stream the conversation live on http://www.whitehouse.gov, an unblocked site in China.
From Shanghai, Obama was to be off to the capital of Beijing for the pomp and substance of a two-day state visit hosted for Obama by Hu.
Obama's China visit features the only sightseeing of his high-intensity Asian journey. He will visit the Forbidden City, home of former emperors in Beijing, and the centuries-old Great Wall outside of the city. Visiting a country's noted landmarks is considered a sign of respect in the world of diplomacy. But Obama aides also have learned that finding some tourist time serves to both calm and energize their boss amid the always grueling schedule of a foreign trip.
As a mixed-race girl growing up in this most cosmopolitan of mainland Chinese cities, 20-year-old Lou Jing said she never experienced much discrimination -- curiosity and questions, but never hostility.
So nothing prepared Lou, whose father is a black American, for the furor that erupted in late August when she beat out thousands of other young women on "Go! Oriental Angel," a televised talent show. Angry Internet posters called her a "black chimpanzee" and worse. One called for all blacks in China to be deported.
As the country gets ready to welcome the first African American U.S. president, whose first official visit here starts Sunday, the Chinese are confronting their attitudes toward race, including some deeply held prejudices about black people. Many appeared stunned that Americans had elected a black man, and President Obama's visit has underscored Chinese ambivalence about the growing numbers of blacks living here.
"It's sad," Lou said, her eyes welling up as she recalled her experience. "If I had a face that was half-Chinese and half-white, I wouldn't have gotten that criticism. . . . Before the contest, I didn't realize these kinds of attitudes existed."
As China has expanded its economic ties with Africa -- trade between them reached $107 billion last year -- the number of Africans living here has exploded. Tens of thousands have flocked to the south, where they are putting down roots, establishing communities, marrying Chinese women and having children.
In the process, they are making tiny pockets of urban China more racially diverse -- and forcing the Chinese to deal with issues of racial discrimination. In the southern city of Guangzhou, where residents refer to one downtown neighborhood as Chocolate City, local newspapers have been filled in recent months with stories detailing discrimination and alleging police harassment against the African community.
"In Guangzhou, to be frank, they don't like Africans very much," said Diallo Abdual, 26, who came to China from Guinea 1 1/2 years ago to buy cheap Chinese clothes to ship back to West Africa for sale.
With the recession, his business has dried up, his money is gone, and he has overstayed his visa. Now, like many Africans here, he spends most of his days at Guangzhou's Tangqi shopping mall avoiding the police.
"The security will beat you with irons like you are a goat," he said. "The way they treat the blacks is very, very bad." He and others pointed out the spot where in July several Africans jumped from an upper-floor window to escape an immigration raid. One migrant was reported critically injured in the fall, and a large number of Africans marched on the local police station in protest.
The Guangzhou Security Bureau said in a statement at the time that it had a duty to check that foreigners living in the city were there legally.
Long-held Prejudice
In the 1960s, China began befriending African countries, supporting liberation movements in Africa and bringing African students to China in a show of Third World solidarity. Lately, China has further deepened its ties to the continent, with Premier Wen Jiabao pledging $10 billion in new low-cost loans at a China-Africa summit in Egypt last week.
But that official policy of friendship has always been balanced against another reality -- the widely held view here that black people are inferior, that white people are wealthy and successful.
"The kind of prejudice you see now really happened with the economic growth," said Hung Huang, a Beijing-based fashion magazine publisher and host of "Straight Talk," a nightly current affairs talk show. "The Chinese worshiped the West, and for Chinese people, 'the West' is white people."
Hung, 48, said her generation was "taught world history in a way that black people were oppressed, they were slaves, and we haven't seen any sign of success since. The African countries are still poor, and blacks [in America] still live in inner cities." Hung noted that Chinese racial prejudices extend to the country's own minority groups, including Tibetans and Uighurs -- or anyone who is not ethnically Han Chinese.
The view of African Americans as poor and oppressed fits into the official narrative of the United States as a place of glaring inequalities. China's most recent annual report on the United States' human rights record in 2008, released in February, made no mention of Obama's historic election. But it said, "In the United States, racial discrimination prevails in every aspect of social life."
"Black people and other minorities live at the bottom of the American society," the report said. "There is serious racial hostility in the United States."
Sherwood Hu, a Shanghai-based filmmaker, was one of the judges on "Go! Oriental Angel" who gave Lou high marks. "Before the Cultural Revolution, China considered black people our brothers and white people our enemies," Hu said. "But deep down, they're a little bit afraid of black people."
The racial animosity here reflects a prejudice dating to China's mainly agrarian past: Darker skin meant you worked the fields; lighter skin put you among the elite. The country is rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, but that historical prejudice remains. High-end skin-whitening products are a $100 million-a-year business in China, according to industry statistics.
"Are we Racist?"
Chen Juan, 27, a secretary in an English-language training school in Beijing, regularly uses skin-whitening products and carries an umbrella on summer days. "For me, the whiter, the better. Being white means pretty," she said. "If someone looks too black, I feel they look countrified and like a farmer. . . . Being white is prettier than being black."
"In my impression, black people, especially Africans, are not clean enough," Chen continued. "To be frank, I just feel black people are too black. Definitely, I wouldn't consider having a black guy as my boyfriend even if he were rich."
P.C. Chike, a Nigerian businessman in Guangzhou who has been in China for five years, exports wigs and extensions made from Chinese hair to his home country. He married a Chinese woman from Beijing, and they have a son, with another on the way.
"Chinese don't like Africans. They don't like black skin," Chike said. "China trying to embrace Africa is a political statement. The question is, how do they treat black people?"
Li Wenjuan, Chike's wife, said she thinks racial attitudes are less coarse in Beijing than in Guangzhou, where the commonly used Cantonese term for blacks translates as "black ghosts."
Some here say Obama's presidency is causing a major shift in attitudes. Others, however, say many Chinese rationalize his election as a fluke of the American system or suggest that Obama, whose mother was white, isn't "really" black.
"It will be really interesting to see what happens when he comes to visit, because I really think the Chinese have a hard time with it," Hung said. "Nobody has dealt with this question of what this means to our sense of race. It's a kind of self-examination that Chinese -- including myself -- need to go through: Are we racist?"
Lou sees similarities between her life and Obama's: She also grew up without her father, whom she never knew. She read Obama's autobiography and watched his campaign speeches on television. She learned how to chant "Yes, we can!" in English and calls Obama "my idol."
Reading the withering online criticisms of her talent-show appearance, she recalled, she came across one post that asked: "Now that Obama is president, does that mean a new day for black people has arrived?"
"I think the answer is yes," she said. "Some Chinese people's perceptions of black people here have been transformed."
War decision looms over Obama’s trip. As the president’s four-nation journey through Asia continues, his agenda is being partially overshadowed by his impending decision on troops in Afghanistan. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie reports.
President Barack Obama raised hopes for creating an Asia-Pacific free-trade region by announcing Saturday that the U.S. would seek to join a smaller group seen as a precursor to a broader Pacific Rim agreement.
News that the U.S. would participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership — joining Chile, New Zealand, Singapore and Brunei — was announced in Tokyo and Singapore, drawing applause at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
"Significant steps like the TPP are important to help keep up the momentum in our efforts to realize the ... vision" to create a region-wide free trade area, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told other leaders at their weekend summit here.
There have been concerns that the U.S., the world's biggest economy, and other nations might turn inward as they grapple with the worst global financial crisis in decades.
Obama's move reinforced calls for expanding free trade rather than resorting to protectionist measures to cope with the recession. He pushed for progress on talks to liberalize world trade.
"In this new era, opening other markets around the globe will be critical not just to America's prosperity, but to the world's," Obama said in Tokyo before departing for the APEC forum.
APEC, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, was created to promote greater trade and integration among Pacific Rim nations from Chile to China. Its scope since has expanded to encompass a wide range of issues, including climate change, energy and food security, and politics.
The anniversary comes amid the biggest global financial crisis since the 1930s. While the worst appears over, the recovery remains fragile, leaders said.
Signs of Protectionism
Trade has significantly contributed to growth in the Asia-Pacific region, but there are creeping signs of protectionism with the economic downturn, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak told his APEC partners.
"It is important that we leaders bear the firm belief that free trade is the way to contribute to national development, and we should prevent protectionism and spread free trade," he said.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called trade a powerful economic stimulus. "We have to do everything in our power to refrain from protectionism," he said.
Leaders said nations must time the withdrawal of stimulus packages carefully, and put better regulatory measures in place to avoid the financial collapse of the past year. They will also push for faster action on trade liberation talks and seek global agreement on climate change, according to a draft statement obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk urged APEC members to work together to stimulate recovery in a "balanced" way, a comment that hints at concerns over China's export-reliant growth.
"A rising tide lifts all boats," he said. "If we work together to rise above this downturn, we can lift up all our economies and all our peoples."
Washington sees free-trade areas as a way to create jobs in the U.S., said Kirk, standing in for Obama, who arrived in Singapore later Saturday.
Singapore welcomed the U.S. announcement and said the TPP, which went into force in 2006, now has the potential to expand to an eight-member group, with Australia, Peru and Vietnam also expressing interest.
Simon Tay of the Singapore Institute for International Affairs also praised the move.
"Americans have to get beyond this idea that free trade with Asia destroys their jobs. Both sides can benefit," he said.
The longer-term goal is to expand the TPP to an agreement encompassing all 21 APEC members, dubbed the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific, but Tay called it "early days" for progress on the broader pact.
Congressional Reluctance
Despite the commitment to free trade, the U.S. Congress has balked at passing agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama negotiated under the previous presidency.
"There are some substantive issues that must be resolved with each of the trade agreements before they can be teed up," U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the AP.
Obama, who visits Seoul in the coming days, has expressed concern that under the proposed pact, U.S. manufacturers won't have enough access to South Korea's auto market.
A call for concrete goals on greenhouse gas emissions, meanwhile, appeared watered down in the leaders' draft statement. A previous draft pledged a 50 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050; the latest draft committed to working toward "a good agreement" at climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, next month to "limit" emissions.
APEC leaders also stressed the need to invest in social safety nets such as education, health care and employment training to ensure stability in the long term.
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama brought up the sensitive issue of suicides in his country, which has the second-highest rate of suicide in the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He called for nurturing economies that value its workers as human beings.
"When you have as many as 30,000 people who kill themselves (a year), that is abnormal," he said Friday. "We should not turn into a country where people take their own lives if they can't find a place in society."
Later Saturday, leaders carried out an APEC tradition by donning the cultural attire of the host nation for dinner. The hand-embroidered linen tunics reflect Singapore's mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures, designer Wykidd Song said.
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God Bless
Laurel @BLACK POLITICAL BUZZ
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