The best outcome of last week’s APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting in San Francisco is that it produced enough of a consensus to come up with a joint statement.

Some member countries apparently wanted to stay away from geopolitics and keep the agenda tightly focused on trade and economic development. That’s a significant departure from a confrontational impasse during the G20 – the world’s principal economic forum – proceedings in Indonesia a year ago and in India last September.

Inspite of that, the U.S. issued a separate APEC statement to note that Washington and “most (APEC) members strongly condemn the aggression against Ukraine.” But the Middle East war was mentioned only as an exchange of views, even though some countries “also shared the united messages of the Joint Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh on 11 November 2023.”

China, for its part, issued no separate statement, but emphasized that APEC, since its founding 30 years ago, has become an important regional economic forum of 21 countries. It is a home to 3 billion people and accounts for 62% of world GDP and 48% of world trade. During those 30 years, the region’s per capita income increased fourfold, and a billion people had been lifted out of poverty thanks to policies of peace and economic development.

A rehash of U.S.-China stalemates

As expected, the U.S.-China summit on November 15, 2023, only produced agreements to (a) “combat global illicit drug manufacturing and trafficking, including synthetic drugs like fentanyl,” and (b) to resume “high-level military-to-military communication” and “telephone conversations between theater commanders.”

For the rest, the world just got America’s well known unyielding statements with respect to China’s red lines. Here are some of them.

The U.S. is committed to “the freedom of navigation and overflight,” according to “international law,” in South China Sea and East China Sea. Those U.S. operations disregard China’s maritime border claims, and Beijing considers them violations of China’s territorial integrity.

Washington also maintained allegations of China’s human rights abuses, with particular reference to the situation in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. China denies U.S. accusations, considers them as an unacceptable interference in its internal affairs, and a “pretext” to damage China’s international reputation.

With respect to Taiwan, the U.S. opposes any military action to change the island’s current status and invites China’s restraint in its Taiwan Strait military activities. Beijing rejects that injunction because, in its view, Taiwan is a province of China, and its status brooks no foreign interference.

On very important issues of trade, U.S. expressed its concern about China’s “unfair trade policies, non-market economic practices, and punitive actions against U.S. firms.” U.S. also intends to protect its advanced technologies, and to prevent them from being used to endanger American national security.

Washington here has a legitimate issue to worry about. But there is plenty it can do to straighten things out because transborder trade transactions should be conducted in accordance with the rules set out by the World Trade Organization. Also, the U.S. trade legislation can, and should, be used to protect American economic interests.

“Kicking the can down the road”

None of these problems are new in U.S.-China relations. They have been thoroughly discussed, some of them for decades, in all kinds of bilateral and multilateral fora. As a result, last week’s U.S.-China summit just brought a restatement of totally irreconcilable positions – including on issues of European and Middle East security.

The U.S.-China summit was an election event to show America’s world leadership, and to open military hotlines to prevent a blowup during next year’s American and Taiwanese elections.

China played along while repeating its strong policy lines of “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.” Beijing remains focused on its economy and regional (i.e., primarily Asian) prosperity, advocating dialogue and partnership rather than turning the Asia-Pacific into “an arena for geopolitical rivalry.”

China’s economy is doing well. In the first three quarters of this year, the country’s GDP increased 5.2% from the year earlier. Ongoing measures of support to domestic demand will most likely maintain that pace of advance in the months ahead. That will also help the ASEAN (an association of ten countries in Southeast Asia), China’s largest trade partner, to stay on a 4.5% growth path, with a steady acceleration expected in 2024.

An important, although little noticed, event for East Asia’s economic and political relations was a China-Japan summit during last week’s APEC meeting. Accounting for one-fifth of Tokyo’s foreign trade transactions, China is by far Japan’s largest trade partner. It is, therefore, not surprising that Japan sought to patch up its China relations.

East Asia is the powerhouse of the world economy. The U.S. should make an appropriate adjustment to that reality. Obama administration’s “Pivot to East Asia” in 2012 was designed to do that, but most efforts went toward security concerns. It is time to correct that and to substantially increase America’s trade and economic engagement in the Asian century.