While Barack is Away Chinese Premier Li Keqiang Will Play

Southeast Asian leaders opened an annual summit with Asia-Pacific counterparts on Wednesday, a gathering where China was expected to take advantage of the absence of the U.S. president to showcase its rising global clout and promote trade yet still talk tough on regional territorial disputes.

China plans to establish an Asian investment bank to help finance infrastructure projects in the region, Li said in an interview published by the Borneo Bulletin, a newspaper in Brunei.

The bloc has been struggling to manage the disputes, which many fear could ignite Asia's next major armed conflict. China and Taiwan claim the resource-rich waters and its chains of islands, islets and reefs virtually in its entirety while ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam lay claim to some parts.

American officials say the peaceful resolution of the conflict and freedom of navigation in the contested waters were in the U.S. national interest, but China has warned them to stay out of what should purely be an Asian dispute.

When asked by Southeast Asian journalists, who sent in their questions in writing, about fears that China might seek hegemony in the region with its growing military might, Li portrayed his country as a gentle giant which has had no track record of expansionism in Asia unlike Western powers.

abcnews.go.com...

If China chooses to look outward and have too much focus on the wider world they are doomed as China itself is an empire of significant size and it will be hard enough to hold it together without external frictions contributing to their problems. I feel the same way about the US and feel they could and should look inwards to solve their own problems. That wouldn't even mean hurting or abandoning the rest of the world as the world is healthier when America is healthy.

In fact the world is healthier when any major nation is healthy and growing economically without imposing itself of others militarily or politically. We need to learn from past mistakes and two of the biggest ones are overextension of empires and war.

China doesn't have the whole human and civil rights thing to deal with. They will murder dissidents. The US feels they have to remove rights to compete with China. IMO

What happened to 40 acres and a mule?