President Barack Obama with Chinese President Hu Jintao

Fareed Zakaria | BIO
CNN Anchor

President Obama landed in South Korea Wednesday for the last stop on his 10-day trip to Asia. The president made earlier visits to China, Singapore and Japan, in his first Asian journey as president.

In Japan, he made reference to his birth in Hawaii and his childhood spent partly in Indonesia, calling himself "America's first Pacific president." But as the trip winds down, analysts are seeking to answer the question of what Obama accomplished.

Fareed Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria: GPS" spoke to CNN Tuesday about the president's trip and about a grim anniversary that's about to be marked in Asia. It's been one year since 10 Pakistani gunmen put India's commercial capital, Mumbai, through an ordeal of terror that killed 170 people. [Zakaria is the narrator of a documentary on the Mumbai attacks premiering on HBO on Friday.]

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David Gergen | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Barack Obama has recently been reading up on the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Coming home from China, he might well focus on Kennedy’s first summit overseas with the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. Indeed, we all could learn from that episode.

Like Obama, Kennedy came into office as an inspiring figure, an idealist who stirred hopes for the future and yet was inexperienced in the exercise of power. At the time, the Soviet Union was a rising nation that was threatening the global leadership of the United States.

In the fall of his first year in office, Kennedy went to Europe where he was welcomed grandly until he arrived in Vienna to sit down with Khrushchev. Kennedy, the idealist, thought that his charm and his appeals to reason would win over the Soviet leader. Instead, Khrushchev bullied him unmercifully and the men were unable to agree on anything of substance. Polite reasoning went nowhere.

According to Kennedy biographer Richard Reeves, Khruschev left the meeting telling associates, “He’s very young… not strong enough. Too intelligent and too weak.” Khrushchev concluded that he could push Kennedy around and started causing mischief from Berlin to Cuba.

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Ole Schell
Filmmaker
AC360° Contributor

Barack Obama was in Beijing as part of a three-day visit to China this week. No doubt he saw many examples of the prosperity of the country: the avant-garde Rem Koolhaas architectural marvels and even the new sterile malls popping up around every corner. What he probably didn't see it what's left behind, the last vestiges of traditional Beijing that barely exist in the city's vast networks of winding alleys know as hutongs.

Hutongs were originally formed when rows of traditional courtyard houses were connected to each other by small alleys in a spider web-like grid. For centuries several families would live in one residence that surrounded its own courtyard. Typically, there would be a single bathroom for each neighborhood and sometimes only one faucet as well.
Even today you might see a line of people around the corner waiting to use the communal toilet in the morning.

This disappearing China is an inconvenience. Its buildings are bulldozed and its people sometimes displaced. A few months ago, while making a documentary about the country's new generation of entrepreneurs, I saw this disappearing world firsthand.

In my neighborhood of Sanlitun, known as the bar district of Beijing, I frequently noticed a knife sharpener riding his bicycle down the street with a grindstone on the back. He rode around the city so people could bring their dulled blades to him. As recently as 10 years ago, the streets of Beijing were teeming with such bicycle merchants and tradesmen, but today he is among a dying breed. I decided to ask if I could tag along with him for the day.

We never exchanged names – I don't speak Chinese - and while much of the growing middle class in the major cities is now learning English, I have yet to meet a tradesmen or laborer who is able to. We communicated by hand gestures alone. In order to set up our excursion, I simply walked up to him and handed him my cell phone with a Chinese speaker on the other end who explained my proposition.

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According to figures released by the Treasury department Tuesday morning, China held $798.9 billion in Treasury securities as of the end of September.

Paul R. La Monica
CNNMoney.com editor

President Obama is in China this week meeting with that nation's leaders. Since China is the largest foreign owner of U.S. debt, I wonder if they are going to give Obama a free toaster.

According to figures released by the Treasury department Tuesday morning, China held $798.9 billion in Treasury securities as of the end of September. That's up slightly from August and just a hair below the $801.5 billion peak that China held in May.

So there's no way around the fact that China is bankrolling a major part of the U.S. government's stimulus efforts and financial bailouts of the past year.

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Victor Gao
Special to CNN

U.S. President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to China will take place at an extraordinary historic moment. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, two of the three largest economies in the world are now in northeast Asia. Furthermore, all signs seem to indicate that China may surpass Japan, either this year or no later than 2010, as the second-largest economy in the world.

The economic disparity between China and the United States is at its narrowest since the founding of New China in 1949, and the gap is closing rapidly. For the first time in memory, China, as a developing country with a relatively low per capita income, has become the largest creditor nation to the United States, the only remaining superpower in the world.

The United States is still very much mired in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is still struggling to get out of the financial crisis and is searching for growth that can provide jobs. By comparison, China is enjoying political stability, high growth at home and robust international relations abroad. While the United States has seemed to worry about not having enough enemies in the world, China is rarely tired of seeking as many friends as possible in the world. As the largest trading nation in the world, China is fast becoming a leading champion of free trade and market economics.

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President Obama will visit China next week

Frances Beinecke
Special to CNN

When President Obama visits China next week, global climate change will top the agenda. The stakes could hardly be higher - for the two Pacific powers and for the world.

Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao have a chance to make a good-faith start at the kind of cooperation the rest of the world might rally around at the global climate summit next month in Copenhagen.

In September, I visited China, where my organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, has been active for nearly 15 years. I was able to see firsthand the efforts the Chinese were undertaking to harness their clean-energy potential.

I toured the green Olympic Village in Beijing, attended a clean tech conference in Shanghai and met with China's top climate negotiator, Minister Xie Zhenhua.

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Editor's Note: This article continues our series excerpted from AC360°'s contributor David Gewirtz's upcoming book, How To Save Jobs, which will be available in December. Over the next few months, we'll be excerpting the first section of the book, which answers the question, "How did we get here?". Last time, we looked at our changing relationship with work This time, we'll begin our look at how changes China and India will be impacting our workforce for years to come. To learn more about the book, follow David on Twitter @DavidGewirtz.

David Gewirtz | BIO

AC360° Contributor

Editor-in-Chief, ZATZ Publishing

Here's an interesting universal truth: everyone wants a better life. This is as true of the desperate poor in third world nations as it is of middle-class Americans. And while economic downturns are scary to most Americans, even the poorest of Americans live a better life than the shocking level of never-ending squalor experienced by some of the poorest of the poor in developing nations.

Almost five times as many Chinese and Indian citizens live on less than $2 a day than there are people in the United States.

Nations like the People's Republic of China and the Republic of India have vowed to change all that. Together, China and India make up 37 percent of the world's population. By contrast, the United States has only 4 percent of the world's 6.77 billion people and yet our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is almost double that of China and four times that of India.

That means that if you want to understand the current job situation in America, you absolutely, positively have to understand the job situation in China and India.

China's economic overhaul

Both China and India began their long march to first-world status decades ago. Until about 1978, the PRC's economy was barely a blip on the world's radar.

When measured in terms of purchasing power, the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is now the second largest in the world, with a $7.8 trillion GDP in 2008. The European Union's economy is technically larger, but that's for a cluster of countries.

China's economic reforms were gradual, often in response to specific problems or economic circumstances.

Since its inception in 1949, China ran a Soviet-style economy. Consumer spending was virtually non-existent, central planning determined nearly all economic activity, and the nation's industrial growth consisted mainly of building big factories. Entrepreneurship was not only not encouraged, it was actively punished.

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Preparations in Tiananmen Square prior to last week's National Day festivities.

Tony Blair
The Wall Street Journal

Yesterday, just a week after the 60th anniversary celebrations of the People's Republic, China kicked off its first World Media Summit. It shows how far China has come—and how far it has to go.

First, understand the problem. We all know China is a nation of 1.3 billion people, but that is just a statistic. Think of how we regard the United States—how different California is from Ohio, for example. Then quadruple it. Think of trying to meld China's 56 native ethnic groupings into one cohesive state. Think of the disaster, not just to the Chinese, but to ourselves, if it fractured.

Understand also how dramatic and daunting the challenge of China's development is. The U.S. has 4% of its population employed in agriculture. Almost 60% of Chinese make their livelihood farming, and more than 150 million live on $1 a day. They need to shift from farming to industry, and they need to do so desperately. The East Coast of China, especially around Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, may look, in parts, like the First World. But rural China, inland and to the West, is in the beginning stages of development. It will have to change at a pace the world has never seen before.

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Zhou Yu is interviewed for the Win In China film in his factory in Weifang, China

Ole Schell
Filmmaker
AC360° Contributor

Today, China marks 60 years of communism with a celebration of ‘National Day.’ As the world continues to cope with the economic crisis, China’s paradoxical hybrid economy – 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' – is predicted to grow by more than 8 percent for 2009.

One of the reasons for this extraordinary growth became clear to me a few months ago while I was in China finishing a documentary called ‘Win In China’ about entrepreneurs.

It was my 12th trip to the country and I found myself in a tin-roofed factory in Weifang, a smoggy city in Shandong Province in North China. I was led across a barren courtyard to a door with a plastic sign on it that read: 'Bra Specimen Room.'

Inside were racks of faux-leopard skin bras, feather boas, lacy garters and angel wings.

"Choose whatever you like for your girlfriend," said Zhou Yu, the 37-year-old proud proprietor of the lingerie brand Ti Hui, and the owner of the factory. “I want all women to love my underwear in the U.S."

I had first met Zhou while shooting the documentary which followed entrepreneurs as they competed on a Chinese TV show also called ‘Win In China.’ The show was a knock-off of America's own ‘The Apprentice,’ but "with Chinese characteristics" and without the Donald.

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