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Home : Media : News : News Article View

# Foreign Press Center Briefing on Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Senior Officials Meeting

By Washington Foreign Press CenterU.S. Department of State

                Washington, D.C.  –              

TOPIC: READOUT OF THE APEC SENIOR OFFICIALS MEETING

MR. WANG: Thank you, and thanks for the moon cake. Just kidding. Anyway, I just came back, as you know, from SOM3 in Beijing where we spent a total of actually almost two weeks, including a lot of sort of working group level meetings. And then – so after SOM3 we, as you know, will have a whole series of ministerials leading up to the leaders meeting in November. And so in fact right now in Xiamen they’re doing the oceans ministerial. So it’s a meeting at the ministerial level on oceans issues, and then there will be about six or seven ministerials. I’ll be going back to China in – this weekend. So I’m not sure where I am actually right now. But I’ll be going back to Beijing, and then there’s a human resource development ministerial in Hanoi, in Vietnam. So I go there to that ministerial, and then to the Philippines.

As you know, the Philippines is the host next year for APEC. So they’re very, very eager to begin to prepare for next year’s agenda and how we can follow through from this year. So I’ll be going to the Philippines and meeting with my counterparts there. And then after that I’m going to go to Hong Kong and have some meetings there, and then go to Macao for the tourism ministerial. So that’s September 13th – and then come back. So I’ll be on the road for about two weeks.

And following that, I’ll probably stay in Washington as much as I can, because we start preparing for the actual leaders meeting, and so there will be a lot of demands in terms of – obviously, President Obama is definitely going. That’s what I understand. And we probably will have not just President Obama, but of course, Secretary Kerry, as well as USTR Mike Froman. But this year we may even have, I understand, possibly – well, clearly – Commerce Secretary Pritzker, possibly Agricultural Secretary Vilsack, as well, and maybe one or two other secretaries. So it’ll be a fairly big delegation from the United States going to Beijing in November. So a lot of preparation.

But in the run-up to that we also have a finance ministerial, we’ll have an agricultural ministerial – I think both in Beijing – and then I’m not sure if you know the actual leaders schedule, but it begins in Beijing on the fifth and the sixth, which is the senior officials (SOM) meeting – the fifth and the sixth. And then Secretary Kerry and Mike Froman will do their ministerials – APEC ministerials – on the seventh and the eighth, and then the President and other leaders will arrive on the 10th – and basically it’s the 10th and 11th in Beijing.

And then I think, as you all know, I think President Obama will be staying behind in Beijing for a day on the 12th, after which he heads out to Burma for the EAS – the East Asia Summit – and then he heads to Brisbane in Australia for the G20 – the 15th and the 16th.

So that’s the general schedule of the coming couple months. Of course, I’m involved primarily in APEC, not in the EAS or the G20. Now let me just make a couple of comments about the substance of APEC as we’re moving towards the leaders week. And then I’ll try to leave a lot of time for questions that you all have.

Now on the substance, I think at my last briefing we talked about essentially the agenda for the APEC year from the Chinese perspective, and you have basically three pillars. The one – the first pillar is the trade and investment pillar, and then the second one is what the Chinese call the innovation, reform, and growth pillar. But in general, those are the set of issues that are related to how we sustain economic growth in the region. So issues of the environment, issues of food security, heath security, women empowerment, internet, urbanization, all of those issues that are important in sustaining growth – so not just growing but sustaining it in a way that would allow it to grow, obviously, in a healthy fashion. And the third pillar, as you all know, is the connectivity pillar. Essentially, there we have a whole set of issues related to trying to increase the flow of people and goods throughout the APEC economy, so including cross-border education, physical infrastructure, regulatory convergence, things of that nature. So that’s the third pillar.

And I’m happy to say that SOM3 is usually the most important SOM meeting, the senior official meeting, because it’s the last one before the leaders actually meet. So we really have to get everything together to make sure that we don’t have a lot of problems during the leaders week. We don’t want to spend a lot of time arguing over things, debating things at the last meeting. So this meeting is very important. And the U.S. had about 200 delegation members go to the SOM3, and when I say delegation I mean it fairly loosely. We had about a hundred from the private sector going, and then a hundred from the different agencies within the U.S. Government going. So as you know, it’s not just the State Department. We have people from Homeland Security; people from Agriculture; people from Commerce, of course; USTR, Transportation; et cetera. So a lot of – Department of Justice, because this year we focused a lot on anti-corruption, so we had people from there attend as well. And so a very big meeting.

And I’m happy to say that this year I can honestly say we really made good progress at the SOM3 meeting with the Chinese host. Very well organized. We made progress across the three pillars that I just talked about.

On the first pillar, let me just say that, as you all know already, the Chinese are very focused on the – on, of course, the large FTAAP, the free trade area of the Asia-Pacific. And so we had good discussions on that, and hopefully by the time our leaders get together, we should be able to actually launch the roadmap for FTAAP for the free trade area. We will have, essentially, the roadmap that would include a lot of events that we’ll be doing – activities we’ll be doing that would include information-sharing, it would include capacity-building, it would include, finally, an analytical study of how we’re going to move towards a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific, what we call FTAAP for short.

So that’s something, of course, the Chinese are very much focused on launching this year in Beijing. And again, we had good discussions, and I think we will have a good launch in November. And we did a few – quite a few other things in this trade investment area, including beginning to look at services, access to services market in the region within APEC – for example, manufacturing-related services that the Japanese and Australians both proposed and we cosponsored.

So we’re essentially – the point is that we’re moving away from – not away from, but from sort of focusing on goods, the liberalizations on tariffs and so on, to the services market. And that’s what we call a global supply chain. And we’re also looking at moving into the environmental services area – trying to open access to environmental services in each of these markets where we can actually expand the flow of services in this area.

And so in that area – again, there’s a long list – as most of you know, APEC is a very broad, broad sort of body of issues that we deal with. So apart from that, in the sustainable growth area, I think I spoke to a number of local press people in Beijing. And I actually arrived fairly early in Beijing because there was a very high level workshop on anticorruption. And the U.S. and China are working very closely together in this area. And also, there was the first meeting of the anticorruption and transparency network, and the ambassador, Ambassador Baucus attended that one. The minister for supervision, by the way, attended the first one – the high level workshop on anticorruption. Huang Shuxian, the minister of supervision, opened the meeting itself, and it was a very good meeting.

Again, I learned a lot personally from that meeting, where a lot of private sector companies, people – law enforcement officials from different economies spoke. And at the first meeting of the ACT network – this is a network of law enforcement officials, essentially – first meeting of this group. And Ambassador Baucus, our ambassador in Beijing, delivered opening remarks at that, as well as a number of others. And the Vice Minister for Supervision Fu Kui was there as well throughout the meeting.

So it was a very useful meeting because the whole purpose of this ACT-NET is to get all of the law enforcement officials who are involved in anti-bribery in the APEC region together to try to begin a process of information sharing among the different economies on bribery cases that essentially cross the border within APEC, and to also share best practices on how we do things, so that we can tackle this issue more seriously and more effectively, and also, essentially, to bring them together to also find out what the various regulations are within each economy. For example, the U.S. has a different set of laws and regulations regarding bribery cases, and also asset recovery regulations. So this would be a good chance for law enforcement officials to know about the particular regulations and rules in different economies. So this is the first step towards that, and so we hope that this will bring in greater cooperation.

But beyond this issue, we also touched on a whole range of issues, as I mentioned earlier. The U.S., for example, is still very much – from the year we hosted in 2011 – very much focused on trying to increase women-empowerment in the economy. In other words, how do we provide greater opportunities for women to access finance markets and to also be more involved in the higher levels of management within different companies in different countries?

This was, of course, also not just a U.S. initiative, but also very much led by Japan because, as you know, Abe and women-omics, is very, very concerned about sort of the aging Japanese society and how you have to utilize more the talents that you have within Japan, within your society, and how to essentially elevate and expand the role of women, which means you have to deal with sort of family friendly practices within companies. So the Japanese, for example, have a proposal where they will – they’ve asked all of different APEC economies to nominate five companies from each economy that have best practices in terms of how they promote and facilitate the role of women in their companies by producing family friendly policies on health, on healthcare, and so on.

So we focused on that as well in SOM3. Again, we also had, essentially, health security issues that we focused on. China, as a host, sponsored two particular sessions that I attended as well, that all the senior officials attended, and the internet economy was one of them. So the idea now is all of our societies are changing so quickly and the role of the internet is clearly very, very significant, so we invited people from Alibaba, Baidu. From the U.S. we invited Uber. Do you know what Uber is? Yeah, it’s sort of taxi cabs – not quite taxi cab, but it’s a service. And I actually never knew what Uber is until this summer. But the Uber person came, and they actually have now Uber service in China. So if you have a problem in China, you can go onto this – I guess whatever you have, an app that you have for Uber, but they’re expanding quite a bit.

And so the point there is that they were trying to show how internet can be used to really – as an innovation – to actually do a lot of things. For example, a lot of small businesses that cannot afford big buildings and cannot compete with the CEOs from big companies, can actually use the internet to really quickly link, organize, do business. And so it could also be used to service a lot of the vulnerable groups within societies that they have access to the internet. So a very, very, very useful seminar workshop with discussion afterwards.

And the Chinese also hosted another one on urbanization in this area. China, as you know, and a lot of other countries continue to urbanize. And so we had presentations from Korea, from Japan, from China on different ways of urbanizing in an environmentally friendly fashion, and how important it is to conserve energy, to design – plan the city in a way that would be efficient and healthy for urbanized growth. On the U.S. part, I spoke a little bit about how in the U.S., we already are fairly urban, but how, for example, in New York City, when you go now to New York City, you can find that even the older cities, there are different ways that businesses have started and communities and neighborhoods have started to make it more vibrant by essentially doing pedestrians’ walks and then urging businesses to get together to sort of make more vibrant different neighborhoods within an old city. And so there are many ways of dealing with urbanization, but it’s now a very major issue for a lot of countries. And so we’re trying to share best practices, trying to find out how we can work together to help urbanization proceed in a healthy fashion there. So those are some areas and if you have questions about this area, we can talk about it more later on.

In the last pillar, on connectivity, we talked, of course, about a number of issues in terms of infrastructure, physical infrastructure development, the need for investment in physical infrastructure. But mostly we spent almost a few hours on what we called a connectivity blueprint. So the senior officials earlier in the year asked the APEC secretariat to produce a blueprint on connectivity. In other words, how do we plan to move ahead to connect the APEC economies more closely together in all of these different areas? And underneath the connectivity blueprint, we have another three pillars.

And the three pillars are: physical; and the second one’s regulatory convergence – we’re trying to get regulations more uniform and more coordinated; and then people-to-people, so cross-border education, tourism, travel, the ABTC card, the APEC business travel card, and so on. So we discussed the blueprint at length and we set targets wherein, let’s say by 2025 – we haven’t decided on the actual date yet, but we set targets where we are trying to, let’s say, double the number of people-flow among the APEC economies, or tourism, cross-border education, trying to increase the number of cross-border students studying in different economies. And so we hopefully will be able to complete the blueprint and as a way of moving forward in terms of connectivity and produce this for the leaders week in November.

And let me just add one last thing. One of our major initiatives – one of the United States, supported by eight other economies – is to actually create what we call an APEC scholarship and internship initiative. And by this what we mean is that we’re getting a number of economies to cosponsor scholarships for students; for example, students from the developing APEC economies to be able to study in another economy on a scholarship if they can’t afford it. So I think we had a very good response. This proposal was made earlier and at SOM2 we had a very good response. For example, Chinese Taipei, I believe, will come up with some 20, 25 or so scholarships, where they will provide scholarships for people to go to Taiwan to study. And I know that China also will have quite a number of scholarships that they will be proposing at the end of the year in November.

Australia – very, very positive. They not only are trying to invite people to go to Australia to study on scholarships, but they’re also trying to encourage Australians, young Australians to go abroad to other parts of Asia, to learn more of the culture, learn the educational system, and so on. And in the U.S. we’re proposing to have a number of companies offer internships that will allow and help students from various APEC economies to come to the United States or to go to some of the companies in the region to intern in, let’s say for example in our case, the APEC members – Caterpillar, Eli Lilly, Qualcomm – will be offering sort of internships or scholarships to encourage, again, more cross-border education.

So I think I’ve gone on enough. Is it 10-15 minutes or so already?

MODERATOR: Yeah, it’s about 20.

MR. WANG: Yeah. So what I’ll do now is just turn to you for questions, and I’ll be glad to answer – and she’ll – she said she’ll select who – I don’t get to pick. Thanks. (Laughter.)

MODERATOR: So just remember, again, wait for the microphones and say who you are and your outlet, please. We’ll start with you.

QUESTION: Thank you, Dr. Wang. Yun Zou with China Central TV, CCTV. Well, my question is that during the senior official meeting, both China and United States has expressed your willingness to work together in fighting the corruption, but we all know that by no means that will be an easy task, because, as you just said, that different countries has their own different interpretation of corruption and also has their own legal system. So I’m just curious that under this agreement, what kind of rules will all the countries abide by and who will mainly chair this agreement? Thank you.

MR. WANG: Okay. Well, first of all, in terms of the actual organization itself, it’s not so much trying to arrive at one rule, because we all know that we have very different political, legal systems. It’s really more to try to understand what each country’s rules and regulations are, so by understanding that – for example, if you – let’s say you had somebody cross a border. If somebody, let’s say, left China or left U.S. to go somewhere else with illegal funds, whatnot, then what you’d need to know – for example, the Chinese officials need to know is if you want to get somebody back to China or their illegally-obtained funds, you need to know what U.S. regulations are, what kind of evidence is needed to be able to actually get that person back or to recover the funds.

So it’s not an attempt to make everybody have one rule or law, because that’s going to be impossible. But it’s more to understand what the requirements are. So in fact, from this meeting that we had of the ACT Net, we produced, to begin with, a directory of all of the offices and the people in charge of the offices in the different economies. So, for example, if you have – if someone went to Malaysia and you have a case in Malaysia, then you can open up the book, essentially, and you know who the responsible offices are and the people are, then you can contact them to begin with. And then we also are producing a guidebook on the asset recovery process. So then this guidebook will have in it, for example, the process or procedures in the United States for recovering assets that are essentially stolen from another country and in the United States. So that’s the purpose of the ACT Network, and it’s not to really come up with one rule.

The other thing, of course, is to exchange best practices. So one of the major goals is to really have cross-border cooperation on assets or people that go cross-border, but also it’s really to learn about how you do it within your own country as well. So in our own country, how we deal with bribery and how you deal with it in other systems. So one of the important things we hope – again, it’s not done yet, but by the end of the year – we hope to have our leaders endorse a set of – and this is more like what you were saying – actually endorse a set of principles on anti-bribery that is very similar, for example, to the ones in OECD. So OECD has anti-bribery principles in terms of making sure that there’s a way of detecting and responding to sort of bribery cases.

So hopefully by the end of the year we will actually have – the U.S. actually drafted a sort of APEC principles on anti-bribery and enforcement of anti-bribery laws. And so we’re hoping that that will then be adopted by the different economies, and this will be one set that APEC economies will then be able to subscribe to and agree to. So you’re welcome.

MODERATOR: Yes, right up here.

QUESTION: Thank you, Dr. Wang, for holding this press conference. Ching-Yi Chang, Shanghai Media Group. I’d like to know, does President Obama expect to sign bilateral investment agreement with China during his trip to Beijing? And also, is there any change of the view of the United States on China’s market economy status, especially after China establishes its free trade zone? Thank you.

MR. WANG: Sure. I honestly don’t really follow that very closely, the BIT. Actually, it’s not a BIA, it’s a BIT – Bilateral Investment Treaty – if it’s between China and the United States. I do know that they’re having about three or four meetings a year, either in Beijing or in the U.S., on the Bilateral Investment Treaty. But I don’t know at what state it is at this point. But my guess is – just in terms of my interaction with my China desk counterparts and all that, and USTR – is that it won’t be at APEC. It’s still a couple years down the line, is my guess, so it won’t be that fast.

But again, I may be wrong. But I don’t expect that we are coming anywhere close this year to actually completing it. We’re exchanging negative lists, for example. There’s a list that the Chinese have that I know is very long from the U.S. perspective, and so we’re still negotiating that. And so it’ll take a while.

Now on the question of market status, again, I know of that more from my job when I was a deputy chief of mission in Beijing. And so I’ve been following that negotiation as well as the BIT. And that one, I believe, we’re still a long way off. But again, I would defer to perhaps others who are more current on this. But I think at this point, if it continues, I think the target date is 2016. So obviously, what China does in terms of its Shanghai pilot zone and so on would help, but I think we’re still a long way off from actually coming up with a change in the sort of market status for China.

MODERATOR: Okay. Yeah, right up here.

MR. WANG: You should give a badge to the people in the back as well.

MODERATOR: I will. (Laughter.)

MR. WANG: We’ve got three people in front.

MODERATOR: Yes.

QUESTION: Thank you very – thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Wang. My name is Atsushi Okudera from Asahi Shimbun, the Japanese newspaper. I’d like to ask about U.S.-China bilateral relationship. This is not a direct – the APEC meeting, but are you planning to have a bilateral meeting, summit meeting, between President Xi Jinping and President Obama before or after the APEC meeting? And if you have, what kind of style? As you know, Chinese Councilor Yang Jiechi last year announced United States and China has agreed next time they going to have a same time of – same style of --

MR. WANG: Sunnyland.

QUESTION: Freestyle – like Sunnyland. So this time are you going to have same kind of – same style of summit meeting in Beijing or other cities? And if you have, what is the point of this time’s summit meeting, particularly in terms of new model of major power relations? They – both country talking about lots of times, but we still don’t understand. It is not very clear. I know this is for avoiding conflict --

MR. WANG: Right.

QUESTION: -- or talking very freely, frankly. But actually, there is lots of differences on South China Sea and East China Sea and cyber problem. So what is the point this time? Thanks.

MR. WANG: Okay. Yeah, as I mentioned at the very beginning, after the leaders meeting is finished, the 10th and 11th, President Obama will stay behind in Beijing on the 12th, and so that’s where the bilateral meetings will be held between China and the United States. Some of the questions you’ve asked actually are probably best answered by the Chinese. We don’t know exactly what the Chinese have planned for the 12th in terms of how they want to do the bilateral at this stage, so I think that’s still in the process of discussion.

But obviously, I’ve heard a lot of comments about how effective it is to actually have smaller meetings where you can actually talk about issues in a more personal way, and I think knowing President Obama’s style and, of course, from the U.S. point of view, we did Sunnyland, and so we think that that’s an effective way of doing things. But – and of course, the Chinese seem to be receptive to that, but exactly what they have planned, we don’t really know at this stage whether it’ll be Beijing, whether it’ll be outside somewhere else. But that’s something I think that the Chinese are discussing with us, but not yet decided, I believe.

And in terms of the actual – the goal and the great – the major power relationship, again – actually, that’s a term that the Chinese came up with, not the U.S. So I’m not sure whether we subscribe completely to the exact interpretation of that. It’s something that Xi Jinping had sort of discussed several times, announced several times. That’s what he wants. But to me, it really – I’m not sure what new style model we have, but to me, it’s really simple.

And essentially, between any two countries – not just China and the United States – is first of all, you have to expand the areas of cooperation as much as you can, whether it’s on trade or whether it’s people-to-people, cultural, whatever it is. So you expand as much as you can the positive side of the relationship. That’s one thing. And the second point is then you manage the differences, because you will have differences, and some more than others, but between China and the United States, we certainly have differences that – some of the things you cited on cyber, on a number of other issues. But – so I would say you try to manage them in a way that would not make it uncontrollable or unmanageable, I guess. So that’s the bottom line.

So we have quite a number of issues between U.S. and China, and so far I think we’ve been able to manage them. So I think the relationship between U.S. and China will essentially be one in which we continue to – on human rights, on cyber or whatever else – we continue to have differences. We need to manage those. And then on the other side, within APEC for example but beyond APEC, we have a lot of, like, CPE, the sort of people-to-people exchange. We’ll continue to expand it as much as possible, and hopefully, the positive side will, in the long term, win out. So that’s what I see as the power relationship that we have.

MODERATOR: The gentleman right here.

QUESTION: Thank you, Dr. Wang. Wait, hello? Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Wang. Xiaoyang Xia, reporter from Wen Hui daily, Shanghai, China. You mentioned that China as a host has set out three pillars for this year’s APEC. The question is: Does the U.S. quite agree with those pillars or themes? And do you have any differences? And what are U.S. priorities for this APEC which you want mostly to achieve?

And secondly, you mentioned under the third pillar the main – one of the main focus is the infrastructure building, and what’s your opinion or what’s U.S. position on the Chinese proposal for the establishment of a Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank? Thank you.

MR. WANG: Yeah. We have no problems at all with the three pillars that the Chinese have proposed because they’re fairly broad, so how can you disagree with trade and investment, or how can you disagree with sustainable growth and how can you disagree with connectivity?

The question, then, of course, underneath them will be working on all of these different issues that are sort of different priorities – some for the Chinese, some for the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, et cetera, and ours. So no disagreement; we’ve been working very well under those three pillars. In terms of U.S. priorities, I mentioned already at some length the question of anticorruption, and I think that’s a joint priority for the U.S. and for China because – and not only that, actually. This priority is actually quite broad, because if you look around the APEC region, whether it’s Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, corruption is a big problem. It’s a pervasive problem in all these economies.

And so the question is: How do you continue to sustain growth without dealing with this issue? Because it essentially produces unfair sort of disparity of wealth and no rule of law, so in the long term, you really have to deal with it. That’s why it’s a very high priority for the United States, and I think also for China, clearly, and for the other economies. So that’s a very high priority.

We’re also very concerned – I think especially Secretary Kerry and President Obama – about the environment. And I think China, Vietnam, Indonesia, others are also because, for example, rapid growth in China over the last 20 or 30 years has produced an environment which is really quite hazardous to your health in terms of air, in terms of water, food security – food safety, I should say, not so much food security but food safety. So we all know that you can grow very quickly, but to sustain it and to actually make it healthy for your own people, you have to really focus on the environmental impact of what you’re doing.

So for example, right now, as mentioned earlier, oceans – we’re having an oceans ministerial right now in Xiamen in China. And so beyond air and beyond water and so on, we’re going into the oceans, where so much of the ocean now has marine debris. So people throw things overboard when they’re in ships, they throw them from the land, they dump it out there, and it’s destroying a lot of the oceans that we have. And again, for the moment, we don’t know that, but in the long term, we’re going to rely on the ocean – the big Pacific Ocean and others. So we hope that we’ll be able to get countries within APEC at this point to begin to work on protected marine areas to begin with, and then sustainable fisheries – not to overfish, not to do illegal fishing or unregulated fishing, because if you were to do over-excessive fishing, then essentially you’re going to be drying out the resources that you need in the future. So the environmental issues are very important, and one of our major U.S. initiatives apart from the oceans – as you know, we did an Oceans Conference here, Kerry did one, inviting global members here. So we’re trying to use some of that – the action plan – we table it at – in SOM3, this action plan from the Oceans Conference. And we’re hoping to use some of that now in the oceans ministerial in Xiamen to try to get APEC to support these various principles.

And beyond the environment, I mentioned already that women is a very high priority for us, because again, we think it’s not only the right thing to do to include women in inclusive growth, but it’s also good for the economy, for your development to be able to utilize all the talent that you have within your society. And so that’s a very high priority for us. So in concrete terms, what the U.S. has done in this area is we tabled, for example, a study that we have done on trying to come up with indicators for women participation in the economy as a whole. So in other words, for example, how many women – what percentage of women are in management positions, what percentage of women have access to finance, what percent of women essentially have access to markets.

So we’re trying to come up with an indicator – we already have done the study; we have come up with 26 indicators. And what we’re trying to do now is get the economies next year to begin to measure exactly where women are in terms of participation in the economy. And once you have that measure as a baseline, then we’ll begin to set targets and see where we’re failing – in other words, why are women so – have no access to finance in certain countries, let’s say, and try to work on improving that. And we’ll set targets and to move ahead.

So we’ve done this study, we hope that this will endorsed – the indicators will be endorsed by the leaders, and then we will then hopefully have the leaders encourage all the economies to begin measuring, and then from there move on to targets in the coming years. And --

QUESTION: (Off-mike.)

MR. WANG: Yeah. The last one, on infrastructure – there a lot more priorities. I have about a list of ten priorities more. But let me just go directly to the infrastructure issue. I think most of you are aware of the Chinese proposal on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. And we have been in touch with China and met with Chinese leaders – Jin Liqun will be, of course, the head of that bank, we understand. We’ve had discussions on that. And there we’ve been very clear about what our concerns are. And our concerns are just that this proposal for this AIIB, that they’re able to meet the various standards of other multilateral development banks – meaning essentially, to begin with, the projects should take into consideration safeguards on the environment.

So when you start an infrastructure project, you have to make sure that you look at the environmental impact of that project, or labor, and what kind of labor you use, what conditions under which they work. That’s one thing. Governance, transparency – meaning that if you’re in construction you’re talking about large sums of money. How should it be dealt with in terms of transparency, governance so there’s no corruption? We go back to the issue of corruption. So our main concerns are that, and we’ve conveyed these concerns to China, and we hope that they can be addressed.

QUESTION: Thank you. Kunihiko Yasue from Yomiuri Shimbun.

MR. WANG: Yeah. Just a little softer, but yeah.

QUESTION: As for FTAAP, Trans-Pacific Partnership is a part of FTAAP. And as to Trans-Pacific Partnership --

MR. WANG: TPP.

QUESTION: -- President Obama in July said he hopes to get something which is public and the Congress can look at by the time he visit Asia in November. So are there any possibility or a plan that the latest meeting for TPP negotiation will be held in the sideline of APEC latest meeting like last year?

MR. WANG: Okay. Let me first correct you on one thing. I don’t think that APEC – I don’t think that there were TPP negotiations per se on the sidelines of APEC. There were meetings, but there were not negotiations. In other words, APEC, heads of APEC in Bali when I was there last year, for example, the TPP leaders got together for sort of a short discussion, but it was not a negotiation. So that’s a very different thing. On the TPP issue, obviously the key player in the United States is USTR. So we’re not actually negotiating within APEC or involving negotiations on TPP within APEC, as you know.

And so I don’t really know exactly what status it’s in right now. Obviously, last year in Bali we were hoping it could be completed by around that time. And obviously, we’re working very hard this year and understand good progress has been made, especially after the various meetings in Japan on market access. But again, on the specifics of the negotiations, I’m not really privy to it so I don’t know how far along it is. All I know is that every time I turn around to talk to Wendy and others they’re off somewhere – or Mike Froman – they’re off somewhere negotiating it or talking somewhere.

So all I can say is I think we’re making progress, but I don’t know what will happen by the end of the year.

MODERATOR: I’d like to offer an opportunity to New York. New York, can you hear me?

QUESTION: Yeah. This is Shen with China Business Network and from New York. And it is good morning, Dr. Wang.

MR. WANG: Good morning.

QUESTION: And you said President Obama and President Xi Jinping will hold a meeting during APEC like one last year. And what will be the possible topics that interest to leaders? And will the issues about the South China Sea and the Ukraine (ph) will be brought to the meeting? Thank you.

MR. WANG: Okay. I’m not sure if I understood everything you said clearly. Well, President Obama did not go to Bali last year, so I don’t know. They didn’t meet in Bali. I’m not sure if that’s what you said earlier, but in any case that’s not important.

I think within APEC, as far as I know, in the APEC context we will not be dealing with some of the political issues you talked about. At the bilateral I think these topics will probably come up. So on the 12th, I guess whatever differences we have or issues we have between China and the United States probably will come up, it’s my guess, at the bilateral on the 12th. But within APEC it’s not certainly part of the topic.

I’m not sure if I got your question entirely. I wanted to give you another chance to say something. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Okay. I just want to say whether this topic whether the issue is about South China Sea and Ukraine (ph) would be brought to a meeting, and what would be the possible topics that interest to leaders?

MR. WANG: Possible targets that are interested to leaders?

QUESTION: Topics.

MR. WANG: Topics. Well, again, you want to separate APEC from the bilateral, and on the bilateral between China and the United States I think we – I can’t say exactly what they will say because it’s something that they will have to determine later on, but my guess is – all of us can guess what the topics would be. I mean, obviously, all of the differences between China and the United States on various issues will be raised, all of the sort of cooperative areas will also be raised.

So I would not be surprised certainly, and I can’t speak for the President, but I would not be surprised if South China Sea came up in a discussion because it is clearly an issue that both countries are concerned about managing, and I think it’s an important issue not just for China and the United States, but it’s an important issue for a lot of other countries in the region. And as for the other topics, again, it’s a wide range of topics. I think we all are aware of some of the range of topics that could be discussed. Human rights could be an issue as well. Trade issues would be important as well. You know we have a lot of trade issues. Cyber could be part of the topic. So I think you probably know better than I do the list of all of the issues that clearly both countries are concerned about today.

MODERATOR: Okay, start here.

QUESTION: Good morning, Dr. Wang. I’m from China, China News Service. I want to go back to the anti-corruption issue. And just now you mentioned that the APEC economies are doing guidebooks, some kind of guidebook to the anti-corruption. And are they going to publish this year, or it will take some year to discuss about the final version of that?

MR. WANG: Right.

QUESTION: Yeah. It will take --

MR. WANG: Yeah.

QUESTION: And besides that, besides the trying to understand each other’s legal system, and what kind of cooperation are they going to do during this anti-corruption issue action, that you call it? Okay, thank you, sir.

MR. WANG: Well, I think on the issue of the publication, actually the United States already has the publication, so we have a template for it. We already have our offices and also we have our asset recovery guidebook. So what we’re trying to do, probably next year, is to have all the APEC economies do the same thing. So clearly, it will not be done by November, but it will be something that will be essentially directed by the leaders for us to do in the coming year. So that’s the agenda for – I think for next year.

And I forgot the second part.

QUESTION: What else are you going to –

MR. WANG: Oh, yes. Yeah, apart from – okay. Beyond that, I think the whole point is I remember very clearly from one of the presentations at the high-level workshop that I attended and how people were talking about sort of cooperation between the law enforcement officials of one country with another, and one of the most important elements of this cooperation is trust. So in other words, you have to have some trust between the law enforcement officials of one country and another when they begin to exchange information or when they begin to try to get cooperation on specific cases. If there is no trust – and of course, trust is based partially on personal sort of relationships in terms of respect for the other person’s knowledge and respect for the other person’s integrity, but also for the system.

So I think one of the most important things we hope to come out of this network is that you begin to then have people meet more frequently – not just on specific cases, but let’s say on training courses so they’ll have a training course. China will be setting up a – what it calls a secretariat for this ACT network. It’s a small group for 2014-2015 and then maybe it’ll move on to other areas. But the idea is to set up a secretariat that would be able to organize training workshops where all of the law enforcement officials will come together and maybe in some area in some country and work together on learning best practices, how you do things, how I do things, and in that process also develop personal relationships among the different law enforcement officials to begin to understand each other. And in that sense, I think that will help facilitate actual progress on cases that actually occur.

MODERATOR: Hiroaki, and then I’ll go to you. These are probably the last two questions, guys. Go ahead.

QUESTION: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Wang, for doing this. My name is Wada. I’m with Japan’s Mainichi – I’m with Mainichi newspaper.

DR. WANG: Mainichi. Mm-hmm.

QUESTION: And my question is about maritime territorial disputes in the bilateral meeting between the United States and China. What is the willingness of the Obama Administration to take up this particular issue? And you also talk about managing differences between the United States and China.

MR. WANG: Between who?

QUESTION: But after what happened off Hainan Island the other day, the interception by the Chinese of the U.S. Navy aircraft, what is the sense inside the Administration about the difficulty of managing the difference? Is that sense of difficulty is increasing, or is there any change? Thank you. These are my questions.

MR. WANG: Okay. Well, I think, again, let me just start by saying that this is not in my area, it’s not in my zone, so I’m not really dealing with that. So I want to make that very, very clear so nobody will think that I am actually speaking with authority on this issue. But all I’ll say is that I expect that all of the issues you raise will probably be discussed simply because they’re important issues. The more important the issues are, the more challenging they are, the more likely they’ll be discussed between our leaders, because they’re the ones who have to deal with these very serious problems. So all I’ll say on that then is that with the recent incident over the intercepts, whatever different versions of it – Chinese and American – I think, clearly, it’s something that we need to discuss. So my guess is that it’s already being discussed and that it will continue to be discussed if – at some point by our leaders.

So is it increasingly more difficult? Yeah, and that’s why you need to discuss it.

MODERATOR: Okay. Weihua.

QUESTION: Hi, thank you. Chen Weihua, China Daily. Yeah, I want to go – continue on that ACT network. Will that lead to deterrence for those Chinese – corrupt Chinese officials to seek safe haven in the U.S., Canada, or Australia, or will that lead to extradition and repatriation of those corruption – corrupt officials already here? So thank you.

MR. WANG: Right. Well, I think the goal, certainly, is to – on both sides, not just China and the United States but on all sides, the goal, of course, is to increase the possibility or the probability that illegally obtained funds or criminals who go across the border will be returned and will be treated according to the rule of law in whichever country they come from. So the goal of the entire thing is to increase that probability, and to increase that probability then the presumption is that each side has to understand what the requirements are for doing this.

And so by starting on this first step to try to understand laws and regulations of different sides, the kinds of evidence that’s needed that’s considered to be relevant information or relevant evidence that could be useful in court, that that first step will increase the probability that in the future people who escape to another country with illegal funds will be returned eventually to their country. So that’s the goal of it. Now, how fast that happens, when that happens, is another issue, but that is the goal. And obviously, if the Chinese were to better understand what kinds of evidence is needed, and if they can provide that to us or to any other country, then obviously, the chances that they will be repatriated or be brought back would be higher.

MODERATOR: All right. Do you want to take one more?

MR. WANG: Sure, I’ll take one, yeah.

QUESTION: Matt Field with --

MODERATOR: Wait just one second.

QUESTION: I’m sorry. Matt Field with NHK, Japan Broadcasting Corporation. Just on the corruption efforts, can you just clarify how many countries were involved in these corruption meetings you attended? Were there bilateral meetings just between the U.S. and China? And so can you imagine a day when the U.S. would be helping China track down corrupt officials here in the U.S. and sending them back to China? Thank you very much.

MR. WANG: Sure. No, it wasn’t bilateral. I didn’t count exactly who was there, but I would imagine almost all 21 economies were involved. It was open, certainly, to all 21 economies. And again, the first day was a workshop, a high-level – well, there are three – actually, three days of meetings. The first day was a working group meeting of the anti-corruption and transparency working group. That’s one day.

The second day that I mentioned Minister Huang Shuxian went is the high-level workshop on anti-bribery. And not only were there 21 economies all invited – and many did go, because I was there – they were also on the panel people from Indonesia, people from Malaysia, other people who were speaking on that panel. And also there was private sector, so companies like Siemens and so on actually made presentations. And from the United States, the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, had people there. Department of Justice had people there. And so it was a 21-member APEC discussion on anti-corruption.

And – oh, whether or not I can see a day when the United States will actually work with China to bring Chinese criminals back to China, I’ll say that we already do. Again, I worked in China for many years, and we already have a lot of cases where – whether it’s from China, from Americans sent back to the United States or Chinese sent back to China in some cases – fewer of those, probably. But we’ve – not just in the criminal cases, but other cases – we have cooperated. There were some cases where we have actually sent people back to China when I was deputy chief of mission in Beijing.

The question then is: How many of them? Of course, the Chinese would like more, obviously, so we are cooperating already. The question is: How much more cooperation can we have? And there we require, again, a better understanding of what kind of evidence we need for this to happen. And if it’s provided to us, then we’ll continue to cooperate. We have something called the JLG, the Joint Liaison Group, that meets several times a year. And that’s where we are already bilaterally exchanging information about each other’s practices as well as information on specific cases. And we also have what we call ILEA program, where we actually bring a lot of law enforcement officials to Bangkok where we have a training center, and that has included some Chinese in the past for the last 10-20 years. So we are working together already on this issue.

MODERATOR: All right. Well --

MR. WANG: One last one?

MODERATOR: All right.

QUESTION: Thank you very much. Hello, okay? My name is Inoue from Kyodo News of Japan. I’m just wondering whether you had any chance to discuss about cyber issue with your Chinese counterparts, because Chinese Government has denied the U.S. allegation about the cyber theft and they refuse to have working group on cyber issue during the S&ED. So I’m just wondering where you are on this issue.

MR. WANG: Okay, good. The simple answer is that within APEC we did not discuss this. It was not an APEC topic. But as you know, they had an S&ED recently and that’s where they were discussed. Now, obviously, I understand that at the Strategic Security Dialogue that it wasn’t an official topic but the two sides discussed it, how can we deal with this issue. But I was not involved in the S&ED so I don’t know to what extent they discussed it, but I know the topic was certainly raised in that context.

QUESTION: (Off-mike.)

MR. WANG: Yes, we have not discussed this issue through APEC. It’s a bilateral issue so it’s not an issue with Indonesia-U.S., Papua New Guinea. They’re not interested in this issue. So yeah, but that’s a bilateral issue.

MODERATOR: All right. Thank you, everyone. We’ll call this briefing concluded.

MR. WANG: And thank you very much for coming. Appreciate it

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