Graft and international supply-chain
When presidents and prime ministers gather here for next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, this will likely form the backdrop to their “family photo” sessions. The image will be as symbolic as it will be architectural. As the Kempinski marketing materials put it, “It can now be said that the sun rises in the east in more ways than one.”
The main APEC agenda will see leaders discuss infrastructure, graft and international supply-chain “connectivity.” But its real value to nations like China is visible on the massive posters that already adorn Beijing and line the new elevated freeway that was built to the resort grounds, a careful and deliberate distillation of a soft-hands marketing pitch China is making to the world. “Co-operation win-win prosperity development,” reads one. “Enhance people’s friendship, further international co-operation, safeguard world peace and promote common development,” reads another.
Six years after the spectacle of its summer Olympics, the APEC meetings are for China another chance to burnish a brand that, more than ever, is in need of a boost. Recent years have seen Beijing wage aggressive campaigns against Western businesses, eliciting charges that it is engaged in rank protectionism. It has used oil rigs and ground troops to push out its borders on land and sea, angering neighbours. Even in African countries, where its companies have built lengthy new networks of road and rail, a majority holds negative views on Chinese business people, products, social responsibility and employment practices.