Purpose
The Senior Dialogue was conceived at a 2004 APEC meeting, after a suggestion made by the Chinese President Hu Jintao to U.S. President George H. W. Bush to create a forum where the global superpower and emerging global player could come together and discuss issues of mutual concern. The typically two-day rounds help establish a framework for bilateral cooperation between the two countries, and give the U.S. an opportunity to shape China's impact on the world as its economy continues to industrialize.
Integrating China into the world's security, economic and political systems continues to be the U.S.'s current policy in dealing with China's rise on the global sphere. However, China's current international economic policies are increasingly rankling American workers and businesses, among others around the world who consider China's trade practices unfair. On June 13, 2007, four U.S. senators introduced a bill that would pressure China to allow its currency to rise in value, which would help close the huge U.S. trade deficit with China, which hit a record $233 billion in 2006. However, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson believes in pursuing a less confrontational and non-protectionist approach.
Read more about this topic: Senior Dialogue
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
“Whoever considers morality the main objective of human existence, seems to me like a person who defines the purpose of a clock as not going wrong. The first objective for a clock, is, however, that it does run; not going wrong is an additional regulative function. If not a watch’s greatest accomplishment were not going wrong, unwound watches might be the best.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)