On Oct. 8, 2013, the 21st APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting continued in Bali, Indonesia. President Xi Jinping made remarks proposing to build a connectivity landscape connecting and covering both shores across the Pacific.
Before the start of the meeting, the participating leaders took a family photo.
The meeting then entered the second phase and the participants discussed a few topics including boosting the connectivity in the Asia Pacific.
Xi Jinping pointed out in his remarks that APEC should follow the trend and compose an excellent chapter on connectivity. First, APEC needs to build a connectivity landscape connecting and covering both shores across the Pacific, based on which the sub-regional economic corridors will be boosted and a big Asia-Pacific market covering 2.8 billion population in 21 economies will be created. APEC needs to ensure the free flow of factors of production in the region, steadily improve the balanced development of members across the Pacific and ultimately realize the integration. Second, APEC needs to break the bottlenecks hindering connectivity and create the investment and financing partnerships among governments, private sectors and international organizations. China is willing to explore expanding investment and financing channels for infrastructure development and proposes to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Third, APEC needs to expedite connectivity and infrastructure development within the framework of regional and international cooperation. Members should uphold the concept of mutual benefit and complementarity, adhere to an open, transparent, cooperative and all-win principle, enhance communication and exchanges, and actively participate in such cooperation. Fourth, APEC needs to enable the people in the Asia Pacific to forge closer ties in economy, trade, finance, education, science, culture and other areas through connectivity and enable them to deepen mutual understanding and trust between the people.
Xi Jinping announced that China will hold the 22nd APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Beijing next autumn. China hopes to take that opportunity to work closely with all APEC economies to develop closer partnerships based on the open, inclusive, mutually beneficial and all-win concept and to enable APEC to play a bigger leadership role in defining the long-term vision for the Asia Pacific.
The participating leaders unanimously supported China to host the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting next year and believed that the meeting will be a success.
The meeting issued the "Declaration of the 21st APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting - Resilient Asia-Pacific, Engine of Global Growth" and the Statement on "Supporting the Multilateral Trading System and the 9th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization". The meeting promised to strengthen policy coordination and multilateral trade system, promote regional integration progress, deepen cooperation in connectivity and other areas, and jointly safeguard and develop open world economy.
