Huairou, Beijing— President Barack Obama and 20 other world leaders participated in a tree-planting ceremony nearBeijingon Tuesday.?xml:namespace>
“When the plenary(全体会议)was done, the leaders took part in a tree planting near the conference center,” a White House reporter wrote whileWashingtonslept 13 time zones away. “Actually, the evergreens were already planted when they got there – one tree for each country in APEC, each with a little pile of dirt and a shovel next to it.” Photos show the president smiling as he holds a shovel and plunges it into a pile of dirt.
After the tree planting, Obama was heard telling a fellow head of state: “Success!” The laid-back president took a moment to joke with a Spanish-language camera crew who called for his attention. “Hey, hombre!” he shouted with a wave.
Obama’s casual style has attracted online criticism from the Chinese people. Live TV coverage broadcast on state-run networks showed him emerging from his limousine chewing gum. Some users of the Sina Weibo microblogging service, a Chinese Twitter, called him an impolite “idler” and a careless “rapper,” according to USA Today.
The gum may have been Obama’s way of coping with the stress of international diplomacy as he faces a rough final two years in the White House: He’s known inWashingtonas a prolific user of nicotine gum as a stop-smoking measure.
Obama told APEC attendees that the annual event “has been able to provide an extraordinarily important forum for generating ideas that boost regional and then global integration, and has helped to provide jobs and support growth in all of our economies.” He will leaveBeijingon Wednesday for Naypyitaw,Myanmar, the site of this year’s East Asia Summit.
The White House’s official announcements have referred to that country as “Burma,” in a hat-tip to pro-Democracy leaders there who resent the 1989 official name-change by an unelected military regime(政权).
Obama’s remaining schedule for the week calls for G20 summit events inBrisbane,Australiaand a speech at theUniversityofQueensland.
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