EU warns sink or swim in financial meltdown

BEIJING (AP) — The global financial meltdown is injecting a sense of urgency into a summit of European and Asian leaders that gets under way in China's capital on Friday.
EU Commission President Jose Barroso set the tone early, saying "unprecedented levels of global coordination" were needed to deal with the crisis.
"It's very simple: We swim together, or we sink together," Barroso said Thursday at a Beijing news conference ahead of meetings with top Chinese leaders.
Held every two years, the Asia-Europe Meeting — known as ASEM — has no mandate to issue decisions, but participants hope it will produce some degree of consensus ahead of a Nov. 15 meeting of the world's top economies in Washington to discuss the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
That may be too lofty a goal for a 43-nation grouping whose members differ widely on their views toward international cooperation and intervention by global bodies. Free-trading Singapore and economic powerhouse Germany are attending, but so too are isolated, impoverished Myanmar and landlocked, authoritarian Laos.
On Thursday, politics threatened to complicate matters as well.
In a sign of Europe's enduring political differences with China, the European Parliament on Thursday awarded the EU's top human rights award to Chinese dissident Hu Jia, despite a warning from Beijing that his selection would seriously harm relations.
Charles Tannock, Conservative foreign affairs spokesman in the European Parliament, said awarding the Sakharov Prize to Hu shows EU lawmakers would continue to highlight the "authoritarian and repressive nature of the communist government" in China, now the EU's biggest trading partner.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said China expressed its "strong dissatisfaction to the decision by the European Parliament to issue such an award to the jailed criminal in China, in disregard of China's repeated representations."
But Liu also indicated that the award would not derail attempts to make progress on financial issues.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to use the ASEM meeting to persuade Asian nations to sign up to a plan to redraw the rule book for international capitalism, calling for a global system of regulation.
Liu echoed the need for changes to the current system.
"We need to explore the possibilities of reforming the international economic structure ... (to) stabilize the international financial markets, and ensure the stable operation of the international economy," he said.
China and other Asian economies are expected to take a major hit from a drop in exports and foreign investment, even though their banks had less direct exposure to the toxic sub-prime mortgages that are wreaking havoc on U.S. and European markets.
The EU has put up euro1.7 trillion (US$2.3 trillion) in guarantees and other emergency measures to save the banking system.More