APEC 2018: Behind the group photo "agreeing on the surface but not in the heart"

The annual APEC Summits typically end with a joint statement and a group photo of the leaders of the member economies.

However, the APEC 2018 Summit did not issue an official joint statement. However, the leaders still had a group photo taken together, but many people believe that although the photo looks like everyone is smiling, it is actually just a "fake smile", hiding behind the story about the competition for influence and power between the US and China that is becoming increasingly fierce.

The first thing that made the media realize something wasn't going as planned was when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strode onto the stage and announced that there would be no joint statement this year.

"I think it's not surprising that there are differences of opinion on trade that prevent us from having a full consensus on the Joint Statement. That's why we're going to have a Chairman's Statement," Trudeau said.

What are the “differences of opinion” in the Canadian Prime Minister’s statement? Perhaps, there is no more reasonable answer than the fact that it was the trade differences between the US and China that caused the 2018 APEC Summit to fall into a deadlock. For the first time in history, the 21 member economies could not issue a joint statement after the Summit ended.

Reports that appeared ahead of the APEC leaders' meeting showed that there were some issues between Washington and Beijing, especially in their understanding of free and fair trade and how to regulate and classify the activities of state-owned enterprises when investing in other countries.

The US sees China’s state-owned companies as an extension of the government, which unfairly protects domestic companies over US ones. The US also believes that China uses its Belt and Road Initiative as a way to “trap” other countries into “debt traps”.

Meanwhile, China insists this is not true and believes that Washington is only seeking to curb Beijing's power and influence by blocking the development of Chinese companies.

Amid the US-China battle for influence in the region, the country gets a new naval base that the US and Australia are re-planning along with a $1.7 billion infrastructure investment from the US.

All of these moves by Washington are aimed at countering Beijing's growing influence in the region.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet in November 2018. The failure of the APEC 2018 Summit has raised concerns about the meeting between the two leaders to seek an agreement on the US-China trade war.

However, the dispute between the two largest economies in the world clearly cannot end soon and may even become the most volatile relationship in the world with dangerous divisions and disagreements for the remaining economies./.