Obama the man and the Hu man at APEC

Twelve nations established the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group in 1989. Bob Hawke of Australia called for effective economic cooperation within the region.  Canberra hosted the first meeting.  Bill Clinton followed it with a leaders meeting on Blake between Vashon and Bainbridge islands of the Puget Sound west of Seattle, Washington State.  APEC was to temper the expected economic growth of China, the awakened tiger of the east.  Member “economies” as opposed to countries seek to promote free trade and economic cooperation, focusing on trade liberalization and business facilitation.  The beat on economies rather than political units allow Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong to sit around the same table as separate entities.

The group’s 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.

Barrack Hussein Obama II is Good Morning America’s 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.

Obama defied all kinds of limits. He 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.  Obama characterized his parents as “white as milk and black as pitch,” they united before the Supreme court struck the Virginia Anti-miscegenation statute (1967) and decreed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 unconstitutional.

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. Crafting 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.

President Hu Jintao is a practical technocrat, the first of China’s leaders without militant revolutionary credentials.  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. With 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.  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 ‘harmonious society’ without invoking the superstitious luggage of the practices of taiji/yin-yang in their ancestry.

Hu’s 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.

Obama’s 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.  Obama projects the image of lucid and dependable self-conscious personality.

It 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.  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.

Hu Jintao’s term in office ends next year, colleague Wen Jiabao, the next.  The 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. Obama, 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:  “You want to be well?  Well, just pick up your bed and walk!”

Obama’s 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.  Hu manly smiled his way through the forum, reminding one and all that China’s economy is far from balanced and sustainable, perhaps, heeding his own ancient ancestors’ tart advice:  “don’t be too humble ’cause you are not great, yet!”

The issue is neither China or the U.S. The issue is glocal humanity. As the world turns, Obama and Hu will be the Man, and we will just aim to let the Main streets of the world, unite!