Beijing memories

It has probably been too long – but I am writing this post as I land at Beijing Capital Airport.  With a day of meetings ahead of me here in Beijing – mainly at Tsinghua daxue – and then on to Shanghai for a conference at the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS), I gird myself for the traffic – Beijing Memories.

But in the end you ignore the traffic – whether here in Beijing or in Shanghai.  And you relish the vibrancy and activity.  The Shanghai Conference is titled, “Creating a More Global and Collaborative Asian and Pacific Leadership for the G20” The objective of the conference is to draw together experts and officials from the Asian and Pacific G20 countries – 9 in total – and describe and evaluate national perspectives.  The experts will key in on the big G20 questions – progress in dealing with global imbalances, arranging financial institutional reforms especially with respect the G-SIFIs (more on that in another post) and the progress in dealing with agricultural product price volatility and development.

This is the second annual conference.  A year ago we found that that there was little collaboration among the Asian G20 countries.  Now we shall see if there is much effort at collaboration in global governance issues among the Asian G20 or the Asian G20 and the United States, Canada and Mexico.