China seen taking centre stage at Apec

POLITICAL and business leaders from the Asia-Pacific and the Americas are making final preparations for the last Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) leadership summit - which starts on Thursday - that Barack Obama will attend as US president. The election of Donald Trump will shape atmospherics, and China has made it explicit that it will seek to push competing trade pacts to the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) whose prospects of ratification in the US Congress now appear dead.

Presidents, prime ministers and CEOs - including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg - will attend not just from the US and China, but also Australia, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Chile, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the hosts Peru. Collectively, these states account for more than 50 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly half of world trade.

It is the anticipated demise of TPP and China's alternative vision for a Free Trade Area of Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) plus a pact, for which discussions have been underway since 2012, known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), that will be key economic and geopolitical undercurrents of the session. Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Li Baodong said last week that "protectionism is rearing its ugly head . . . China believes that we should set a new plan to . . . sustain momentum for the early establishment of a free trade area".