Bay Area in spotlight, protesters aim to disrupt world leaders

Presidents, prime ministers and prominent CEOs are gathering this week in San Francisco for two Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits to forge and strengthen trade relationships among the 21 member countries — while local business groups hold piggy-back events and thousands of protesters prepare to disrupt the proceedings under a global spotlight.

The APEC Economic Leaders’ Week, which runs through Friday, is being promoted as the largest gathering of world leaders in the city since 1945. Heads of state from member countries, including President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, are set to attend, with about 1,200 CEOs and nearly 30,000 delegates from governments and organizations expected for the summits.

The influx, with security measures including road closures and checkpoints, will restrict movement within the city and is expected to snarl traffic.

The complementary CEO Summit running Tuesday through Thursday will provide the Bay Area with rare opportunities to boost investment and trade between the region’s businesses and companies overseas, said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

“We’ve been a major hub for the United States, a major connecting point with Asia for a long time,” Randolph said. “Our companies here invest heavily throughout the world, and there’s a lot of investment from companies around the world in the Bay Area and a large diplomatic presence. A lot of that presence is about technology and connecting those economies to our economy.”

APEC countries — which range from Australia to Vietnam — make up almost 40% of the world’s population, nearly half of global trade, and are seven of the top U.S. trading partners, according to APEC.

The San Jose metropolitan area exported $15 billion in goods to APEC countries last year, and the San Francisco metropolitan area exported $21 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. California exports about $125 billion in goods a year to APEC nations, and imports about $400 billion, according to the department.

Established in 1989, APEC is dedicated to economic growth and regional political and business integration. Like other free-trade groups, it has become a flashpoint for protests against governments and powerful corporations. The CEO Summit features a who’s-who of controversial figures, from ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, whom a congresswoman accused in 2021 of lying to Congress about climate science, to Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber, which agreed this month to a $290 million settlement over alleged systemic theft from its drivers, to Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, whose administration was accused last month by the UN of human rights abuses, to President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea, who has attacked feminism and whose government is seeking to scrap its gender-equality ministry.

The focus of APEC events “is entirely on enriching businesses within member countries,” said Nik Evasco of the No to APEC Coalition, a Bay Area-led alliance of several dozen activist groups. Thousands of protesters are expected to hit the streets in San Francisco for a major march Sunday, with demonstrations throughout the week. Activists are targeting the CEO Summit for another big protest Wednesday, Evasco said.

“We’re really here to shut down the negotiations between the CEOs and the world leaders,” Evasco said. “Success for us is disrupting that conference between those leaders and CEOS to the point that it’s near chaos.”

Evasco said activists will also protest APEC-adjacent meetings Monday and Tuesday in San Francisco for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, a Biden initiative to promote economic growth among 14 nations, most of them APEC members.

Singmay Chou, an adjunct professor of business at San Jose State University, said over its three decades, APEC has boosted trade among members, especially between the U.S., China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, but that’s changing.

“There has been a redirection of U.S. trade within APEC away from China and toward Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia,” Chou said. “The overall growth among APEC countries will likely decline as a percent of global trade. Countries outside of APEC, primarily India, and several countries of Africa, are among the world’s fastest-growing economies and more global trade will flow to those areas.”

The gathering in San Francisco comes at a time of fraught geopolitical affairs, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war between Hamas and Israel destabilizing APEC relationships, Chou said. Tighter relations between China and Russia could lead the U.S. and China to impose conflicting demands on APEC countries, creating a thorny problem for APEC, Chou said.

A Wednesday meeting between presidents Biden and Xi could warm chilled relations between the two nations, which many businesses would welcome, Chou said.

Several Bay Area tech executives are expected to speak at the CEO Summit, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta’s global affairs chief Nick Clegg, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Silicon Valley giants do substantial business with APEC nations, but relations are not universally smooth: China blocks Google, Facebook and Twitter, while other countries have pushed back against social media companies, with Malaysia this year threatening legal action against Meta over content it considered problematic, and Australia and Canada passing laws to make Google and Facebook pay for news on their sites.

For Bay Area businesses, APEC and several spinoff gatherings will raise potential opportunities, said Russell Hancock, CEO Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a San Jose-based think tank. “The schmoozing will be terrific and they’ll meet a lot of people and it may lead to really productive talks about business deals,” Hancock said.

For San Francisco — its downtown beset with blight, empty offices and vacant storefronts in the wake of the pandemic — APEC provides a potential opportunity to regain some of its shine as “a city just teeming with innovation,” Hancock said.