HILLARY CLINTON IN HONG KONG

2 days ago Hillary Clinton was in Hong Kong on a very short visit before travelling to Shenzhen.
Here some key-points from her speech in Hong Kong from THE ATLANTIC writer: Stewart M. Patrick who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (where he writes the blog The Internationalist) and Director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance.
At the end of the post a YouTube video from Hillary's speech, where she is
promising the USA debt crisis will be solved.

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Clinton's first goal was to reassure her audience that the United States, despite its fiscal woes, remains fundamental to economic prosperity and regional security in Asia. She emphasized that the United States under the Obama administration "has made a comprehensive commitment to reinvigorate our engagement as a Pacific power--shoring up alliances and friendships, reaching out to emerging partners, and strengthening multilateral institutions." In sum, the United States is "a resident power in Asia.... And we are here to stay."


At the same time, Clinton insisted that the global economic crisis has underscored the need to "reach agreement on the rules and principles that will anchor our economic relationships in the coming decades." Those principles include:

1.The Asia-Pacific economic system must be open--shedding rules that restrict trade and create discriminatory markets. Exclusive trading arrangements fragment the regional economy. It is time for a broader Trans-Pacific Partnership that unites the region.

2.The regional system must be a free one, in which "ideas, information, products and capital can flow unimpeded by unnecessary or unjust barriers." Just as the United States seeks to attract foreign investment, so others must be open to U.S. and other foreign capital.

3.Economic regulations must be developed transparently and communicated to all parties, rather than conjured up when convenient.

4.Finally, rules must be applied fairly to all, since "fairness sustains faith in the system. That faith is difficult to sustain when companies are forced to trade away their intellectual property just to enter or expand in a foreign market, or when vital supply chains are blocked."

(This last critique was aimed squarely at China, which has alienated investors and trading partners through its "indigenous innovation" policies and its embargo on exporting "rare earth" metals to Japan.)

Clinton's four principles--which she first articulated at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) senior ministers' meetings in Washington in March--are hardly original. They have been part and parcel of the U.S. vision of an open, multilateral system of trade and payments since the end of World War II. Then, as now, the overriding U.S. strategic objective was to prevent the world's fragmentation into competing, discriminatory economic--and eventually political--blocs.

What is novel in Clinton's approach is her insistence that developing countries--which have often been granted special treatment--can no longer be exempted from binding rules.

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