Vice President Joe Biden Weekly Address January 3, 2015 (Video/Trascript )

Vice President Joe Biden
Weekly Address
The White House
January 3, 2015

 

Hello everyone, this is Joe Biden. I want to wish you all a Happy New Year.
I know this is the time of year when we make resolutions to take care of our health, whether it's joining a gym or eating healthier. But there's one thing you can do right now that will also make a big difference in your health: that is getting quality, affordable health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Because of that law, access to quality health care is improving. Last year, almost 7 million people signed up for health care coverage under the new law and paid their premiums. And in many cases the cost of health care is less than the cost of your cell phone or your cable bill. In addition, millions more are getting the care that they need through Medicaid that they weren't getting before.

And because of the new law, people who already had health insurance are also benefitting from additional protections. For example, their insurance companies can't deny them coverage because of pre-existing conditions, like asthma or diabetes. And they’re able to get -- for free -- preventive services like mammograms or blood pressure screenings that their doctors ordered for them, saving them a lot of money.

Everyone is beginning to realize what millions of you already know -- the Affordable Care Act is working. And we're just getting started. Because there are millions more of you who can get quality, affordable health care if you sign up before February 15th of this year. That’s now through February 15th.

Now if you don't have insurance, you can go to HealthCare.gov, where you'll find a menu of a bunch of different plans and what each plan covers and how much each plan costs. All you have to do is just pick one. The best one that fits your family's health care needs and your family's budget.

If you don't want to go to HealthCare.gov and you want to talk to somebody on the phone instead, you can call, I'm going to give you the number now, you can call 1-800-318-2596. From this moment on, you can call any time of the day, any day of the week. Phone lines are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And for folks listening today whose family and friends may not speak English: let them know that there are translators available in over 150 language to guide them through the process.

And if you're not comfortable going online or speaking on the phone, and you want to sit down with an individual to help you through this, you can find out where to go as well. Because in every community, at local libraries or community health centers, people are there to help. All you have to do is go on HealthCare.gov, type in where you live, and you can find out exactly where to go to sit down with a person who will help you walk through the process.

But here's the really important point I want to make. If you don't sign up by February 15th of this year -- with only a very few exceptions -- if you don’t sign up by the 15th of this year, you’re going to have to wait until 2016 to get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

And even those of you who already have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, you can also go on HealthCare.gov to find a plan that might offer more benefits or be more affordable in price for you. You might even qualify for additional help paying for the insurance you choose because your income isn't what it was last year.

Now I'm sure some of you already heard from your friends and neighbors who’ve signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act what I hear all around the country. I hear it provides peace of mind that someone you love will be covered if God-forbid something happens. It provides security, so if you have a bad strain in your ankle or your back and you don’t have the money to get treatment, you can now get the treatment rather than wait, put it off, and end up with a chronic condition. And it provides a lot of freedom, and choice, and opportunity -- so you can switch jobs or move to another city without the fear that you'll lose out on the health insurance with the company you now have it with. And what I'm hearing most is how pleased and excited people are about how affordable it is.

An awful lot of people who didn't think they could or would find quality, affordable health insurance are actually able to get assistance from the government to help them pay for their health care plans at a cheaper rate. Let me give you an example. A family of four with an income of around $95,000, they can still get a subsidy to lower their health care premiums.

But maybe most importantly, what I hear is that we have finally ended the debate in this country of whether or not health insurance is a right or a privilege. We think everyone in America has a right to have adequate health care insurance. And the Affordable Care Act gives them that right.

So sign up. And spread the word. Protect your health -- not only for your sake, but for the sake of your families.

Thanks for listening, and Jill and I wish you again a happy and healthy New Year. God bless you, and may God protect our troops.

How Much Does Xi Make a Year? The Surprising Answer

By Rachel Lu 
Source: Tea Leaf Nation

On March 5 at the National People’s Congress, an annual meeting of China’s legislature, Beijing announced it plans to spend $2.45 trillion in 2014. While it’s unknown how much of that goes to salaries (the budget is broken down by industries), the amount for top officials is likely surprisingly low.

Based on available information, if Chinese President Xi Jinping were to decide to buy a 100-square-meter (about 1,080-square-foot) two-bedroom apartment in central Beijing, it would set him back almost $1 million at current prices. That means Xi, who by all appearances draws a nominal annual salary of about $20,000, would have to toil for 50 years as China’s top leader to afford this modest property — assuming, that is, that he and his family didn’t pay for any other living expenses during that time. By contrast, if U.S. President Barack Obama were to do the same in the swankiest bits of Washington, D.C., he would have to pay about the same sum, but one amounting to a little over twice his annual salary of $400,000.

Of course, Xi would never need to worry about purchasing an apartment on his salary alone. He and his family live in the sprawling Zhongnanhai compound in the heart of Beijing. As a high-ranking official in China, his food, transport, and medical care are also covered by the state. And a Jan. 21 report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists shows Xi’s relatives have held corporate entities offshore in the Cook Islands or British Virgin Islands. That’s not illegal, but it’s a move that the entities’ owners often make to store or protect assets. Xi’s family is not exactly hurting.

The salaries of China’s top leaders are not public information, so details about them reaches the public in unintentional dribs and inferred drabs. In June 2011, while speaking to university students at a public event, Yu Zhengsheng, a member of China’s ultra-powerful Politburo, made the rare disclosure that his basic salary was approximately $1,700 a month based on salary standards for Politburo members, and he claimed that he had to “pay for his own cigarettes” and “buy clothes at market prices.” Since Xi is also a Politburo member, Yu’s statement is a good baseline to gauge Xi’s salary. In April 2013, state-owned weekly magazine China Newsweek reached a similar number through deduction, calculating that the basic salary for China’s top leader was likely around $1,600 a month by examining the salary slips of ordinary civil servants and noting the incremental increase at each promotion.

If that’s correct, and Xi had to survive in Beijing on his basic salary — approximately twice the average salary of $850 per month in the city — he would not only be unable to afford an apartment, but he’d have to scrimp just to make ends meet. A popular infographic that made the rounds in October 2013 on Sina Weibo, China’s popular microblogging platform, calculates that someone living in Beijing on a salary just shy of Xi’s would be left with savings of $50 each month after deducting reasonable expenses, including approximately $500 a month for rent and $250 a month for food.

On March 5, 2014, China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, reportedly said at a public forum that newcomers filling slots in the foreign ministry — one of the most coveted jobs for new graduates in China — could not afford to rent an apartment in Beijing. But luckily for them, Chinese civil servants have long benefited from generous government subsidies to supplement their modest official incomes, and can sometimes count on gray income or even outright bribery. That’s one reason that over the past 10 years, the number of young Chinese college graduates taking the civil service exam has surged from approximately 120,000 in 2003 to more than 1.5 million in 2013, roughly an elevenfold increase. As housing prices in China’s major cities rose drastically in the first decade of the millennium, graduates and their parents began to favor the housing subsidies, retirement benefits, and other tangible perks that come with a civil servant position over nominally high salaries in the private sector that lack the same safety net. This preference has become controversial: Economist and Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps reportedly slammed the “frenzy” of competition for Chinese government posts as a “waste of talent.”

The fever may now be cooling a little. As part of a crackdown on corruption, endemic in party ranks, Xi introduced the so-called “Eight Point Regulation” in December 2012 to rein in perks and gray income for civil servants. According to domestic media reports, junior civil servants were disproportionately affected, while their seniors largely carried on as before. The results of an anonymous survey of public servants by liberal outlet Beijing News, released Jan. 9, showed that 92 percent of participants reported that their “income from outside of work” had fallen over the past year. In 2014, wealthy Zhejiang province counted 25 percent fewer applicants to its civil service positions than in an analogous period the year before.

Top leaders like Xi will never have to worry about paying the bills, even as they spearhead crackdowns on nonessential perks. But civil servants in China, who likely make far less than the president, may want to start looking into more modest homes in Beijing’s vast suburbs.

Freedom, Fried

Why Taiwanese are getting fed up with the island's salacious, in-your-face media

BY Chris Fuchs  

Source: Tea Leaf Nation

Taiwan maintains the distinction of having the freest television and print media in all of Asia, ranking 50th among 180 countries worldwide in a press freedom index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, a French nonprofit. But if an outsider had docked on the island in the last few months, he might be forgiven for assuming that all of Taiwan was transfixed on two major news stories: a building-sized art installation in the form of an inflatable yellow duck, which on Dec. 31, 2013, exploded in the waters off of Keelung, a city near the capital Taipei, and a mixed-race Brazilian teenager on a self-discovery tour in Taiwan who rode the metro, ate some dumplings, and, on Jan. 4, made out with a reporter almost twice his age. 

While mainland China, Taiwan's cross-strait rival, continues to keep a tight leash on its media, Taiwan's freewheeling television, print, and web media -- and their penchant for superficial reportage -- are causing antipathy among a growing number of its inhabitants. 

Over the last decade, Taiwanese media have come to be known for in-your-face, no-holds-barred reporting that manages to be simultaneously sensationalist and mundane. 

Over the last decade, Taiwanese media have come to be known for in-your-face, no-holds-barred reporting that manages to be simultaneously sensationalist and mundane. A popular online editorial published Jan. 7 by Taiwanese magazine Business Weekly lamented that important issues -- like the county government forcibly taking land in Dapu, Miaoli, a village in northwest Taiwan, and the June 2010 signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement between China and Taiwan -- remain underreported. Meanwhile, the island has seen what the editorial calls coverage "of every move" of the Taipei Zoo's new baby panda for about half a year, and Taiwan's Yahoo page has created an entire page devoted just to the now-deflated yellow duck, regularly re-posting news articles published in other media outlets. 

In a Jan. 6 editorial in China Times, a Taiwanese daily newspaper, media executive Antony G.C. Wu related a personal story of a friend living in Europe who returned to Taiwan after an unspecified period of time abroad, only to be shocked by what the Taiwanese talking heads were saying on-air. 

The rhetoric included frequent Chinese-language equivalents of "shit," "what the fuck," and other verbal bombs unfit for even some of the crassest U.S. cable news shows. Journalism professor Yang Aili, in a Feb. 12 editorial in the same publication, blamed Taiwan's media for a lack of international perspective, observing that outlets seemed to attach "more importance to covering car accidents than to important world affairs." (Yang advised readers to sign up for Chinese-language email updates from publications like the U.K.-based Financial Times and U.S.-based New York Times, instead of relying on the Taiwanese press.) Even users of social media are showing signs of fatigue; a search on Facebook -- the social network of choice for young Taiwanese -- revealed multiple pages devoted to discussing the problems with Taiwanese media, writ large. On one such page, a user rants in English that "Taiwan's media sucks," providing "junk-food like news" that turns the audience into "zombies."  

The macabre, salacious, and ridiculous stuff populating Taiwanese media certainly enjoys a wide audience. Readership for Taiwan's print media has waned over the last two decades; but as of March 2013, there were just under five million cable television subscribers in Taiwan, accounting for over 60 percent of households across the island, with news programming ranking second only to movies in viewership in 2012, the most recent time period for which data could be found. But with 17.5 million Taiwanese (about 75 percent of the island's 23 million inhabitants) wired to the Internet as of May 2012, readers have increasingly been turning to the web for their news. That might help explain why Taiwanese were so intrigued by chatter about that giant yellow duck that 1.5 million people, presumably mostly from Taiwan, travelled to Keelung to snap pictures. 

Taiwan's media have not always enjoyed the freedom they possess (and arguably abuse) today. 

Taiwan's media have not always enjoyed the freedom they possess (and arguably abuse) today. 

During Japanese colonial rule from 1895 to 1945 and then also during the martial law period under the Kuomintang government, which lasted from 1949 to 1987 after the Kuomintang fled mainland China after losing the civil war, authorities maintained tight control on Taiwanese press. It wasn't until 1987 -- when then-President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law -- that restrictions on news coverage were removed and Taiwan's media landscape came to life with a new crop of independent print publications and television stations. 

Andy Hong, a reporter for Taiwanese newspaper Want Daily and a journalist in Taiwan for 20 years, said that Taiwan's post-martial law media did not originally run "bloody" or "gossipy" news stories, adding that "newspapers were like those published in the early days of China's Republican era," after China had toppled two millennia of imperial rule. Instead, Hong said, they thought they had an obligation "to promote cultural literacy." Hong's colleague Yongfu Lin, who became a reporter with the China Times in 1985 and is now deputy director of Want Daily's cross-strait news division, said that in the years after martial law, "news reports were very diverse," and the public had "fewer misgivings about the media," partly because journalists were for the first time targeting political figures who were "once considered off-limits." But Hong claimed things changed around 2003, when Hong Kong-based Apple Daily, a web site and broadsheet with a tabloid flair known for publishing color photos of grisly crime scenes and scantily-clad women, entered Taiwan and "immediately attracted readers." 

One possible explanation for the domestic attraction of Taiwan's increasingly inward-looking media is its continued diplomatic isolation at the hands of China, which still considers Taiwan a renegade province. Joe Wei, managing editor of the World Journal, a U.S. and Canada-based Chinese-language newspaper owned by Taiwan's United Daily News, said he believes the lack of opportunities to participate in international organizations has led to a "loss of interest in things going on outside the island." Hong agreed, saying, "It probably has something to do with the island's mentality of being a small country." In the China Times editorial, Wu noted that compared to Taiwan's television media, even China Central Television, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, covers a wider variety of topics with "both a sense of history and a worldly perspective," adding that the outlet's performance "is enough to make Taiwan's television journalists ashamed." 

Taiwanese media also reflect -- and exploit -- a schism between those preferring the island's current status of de facto independence from mainland China and those who want something more formal. 

Taiwanese media also reflect -- and exploit -- a schism between those preferring the island's current status of de facto independence from mainland China and those who want something more formal. Strong political beliefs among Taiwanese, Hong said, have emboldened media outlets to reveal their own political character, thus cleaving the country's media landscape into two halves, leading to highly biased reporting of almost any political or economic issue by media outlets sympathetic to one or the other political cause. 

To be sure, Taiwanese investigative journalists do occasionally break real stories. As early as 2005, Taiwan's media began reporting on problems with the island's electronic toll collection system, which most recently has come under fire for overcharging motorists. The magazine Business Today, a reputable business weekly, published an exclusive in May 2013 exposing the presence of carcinogenic additives in a popular brand of soy sauce sold in Taiwan, touching off a wide-reaching scandal involving some of the island's most well-known food companies, and prompting the government to take additional steps to ensure the safety of all its food products. And in December 2013, Taiwan's television and print media reported on accusations that a technology company in the southern city of Kaohsiung secretly dumped wastewater into rivers, leading to further government investigation. 

It's heartening to know that Taiwan's press has the capacity to cover real stories, when it wants to. But in the end, Taiwanese journalists and media critics say, it is the public's decision to either tune in or tune out that will ultimately shape the direction of news content in Taiwan in the years to come. The public's following a policy of "no watching, no clicking, no responding" to trivial news, the Business Weekly column argues, is the only way Taiwanese media will change. The prognosis is not good. It might "take decades before seeing results," the column continues, even if the public does change its consumptions habits. If it doesn't, the next generation will continue to be "bombarded by brain-dead news."  

Tears for Fears

 Chinese educators are rethinking the learn-and-churn model. 

 BY Yiqin Fu 

Source: Tea Leaf Nation

The United States is growing increasingly anxious about losing its educational competitiveness to countries like China -- but the grass seems greener from across the Pacific. When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a December 2013 report on worldwide student performance, the United States found its students trailing far behind Shanghai, the top scorer in reading, math, and science. While Shanghai is of course a city, their students did so well in math that their scores put them two years ahead of their peers in Massachusetts, the United States' strongest-performing state. But just as more Americans begin to look approvingly at China's educational model, the traditional Chinese parenting and teaching style -- with its emphasis on high expectations and strict discipline -- is facing a backlash at home.

With a Confucian tradition that puts heavy emphasis on filial obedience and academic achievement, the stereotype of strict Chinese parents wringing the best out of their children through harsh techniques certainly has its basis in truth.

With a Confucian tradition that puts heavy emphasis on filial obedience and academic achievement, the stereotype of strict Chinese parents wringing the best out of their children through harsh techniques certainly has its basis in truth. Indeed, sometimes the line between tough love and child abuse becomes blurry, and a "tiger mother" -- a term referring to an aggressively ambitious parent popularized by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua -- becomes potentially toxic. Now, there are signs some Chinese have had enough.

On the popular Chinese social network Douban, a group calling itself "Anti-Parents" has more than 77,000 members, where users share stories of childhoods spent under the thumbs of controlling parents. In a survey on the forum, almost all of the roughly 1,600 responses named development of self-confidence or self-esteem as the most precious thing the respondents' parents hindered during their childhoods. In one story typical of the forum, a user wrote that her mother used to slap her "for every mistake in my homework" and gave her a tongue-lashing "in front of neighbors and classmates" for failing to win election to the class council. Indeed, entire Chinese schools have been built around this type of "oppressive, utilitarian, and humiliating" style of education, wrote Li Xuan, a doctoral student of developmental psychology at Cambridge University.
In a June 2012 public letter, Li accused teachers at her elite elementary school in Nanjing, a large city in southern China, of engaging in corporal punishment, screaming at students, and throwing their backpacks out of school windows. Such "chronic humiliation, social aggression, and attacks on self-confidence" brought about a "life-long sense of insecurity," she wrote.

But some of China's would-be tiger parents are now opting to purr rather than roar. So-called appreciation education, which encourages adults to celebrate children's successes instead of focusing on their failures, is now in vogue. Chinese publication Southern Education Weekly wrote in June 2013 that Shenzhen school officials were considering rolling out the program among all city high schools, although they have not yet done so. Some elementary and middle schools around China have already revamped their curricula around this philosophy. Jishui Number 1 High School in central Henan province linked teachers' bonuses to their ability to embrace these new methods, while

Xilin High School in Shanghai designated every Monday "appreciation day," when teachers must compliment at least 20 students in class.

Xilin High School in Shanghai designated every Monday "appreciation day," when teachers must compliment at least 20 students in class. And more wealthy Chinese parents are sending their children overseas to study -- not only to improve their English, give them an international outlook, and improve their chances of getting a coveted foreign passport, but also to benefit from a more holistic approach to education. It's all part of a "rising tide" of Chinese parents "who care more about their child's well-being than his or her test score," Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Tsinghua University High School, one of China's top secondary schools, wrote in December 2013.

But that shift has yet to show in China's uber-competitive college admissions process, which continues to place overwhelming weight on entrance exam scores. That means anxious parents planning their children's future feel they have little choice but to steer them, sometimes with heavy-handed scolding or prodding, toward exam preparation, to the exclusion of their hobbies and other interests. In May 2012, photographs went viral on the Chinese web showing high school students in central Hubei province studying for the Gaokao, China's college entrance exam, while hooked to intravenous drips of amino acids. In June 2012, a young man named Shen Fei in the hardscrabble eastern province of Anhui learned only after completing the Gaokao that his mother had died in a car accident over a week earlier; family members and several in the surrounding community told Anhui television they had hidden the truth so that Shen could focus on his test. In January 2013, state-owned newspaper People's Daily carried a story describing how one 9-year-old girl would stay up until 10 o'clock each night working on her homework, then get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to finish it.


Chinese education authorities have plans to lighten the workload for school children with measures that include mandating less homework and scrapping the entrance examination to middle schools in major cities. But reforms to the school system will take time to materialize, and the cultures of overwork they have created will not go gently. For Chinese children currently in the state-run school system, a break from the grind -- much less appreciation -- may still lie a long way off.

American History, Through Chinese Eyes

By David Caragliano
Source:Tea Leaf Nation

White male privilege, genocide against Native Americans, slavery and subsequent racial oppression, exploitation of immigrants and laborers, repression of women and homosexuals, and environmental destruction — teaching American cultural history through a post-modern lens is hardly the most obvious way to promote positive feelings toward the United States. Yet that is precisely what Amy Werbel did during her Fulbright year in China.

“We were not going to China to make the United States look better than it is — but rather to share what it feels like to be in a classroom in which everyone is free to scrutinize history without fear,” explains Werbel. A professor of Art History at the State University of New York, Werbel taught courses on American culture from the Civil War to World War I and on America in the 1960s at Guangdong Foreign Studies University between August 2011 and July 2012.

Werbel’s new book Lessons from China: America in the Hearts and Minds of the World’s Most Important Rising Generation chronicles her experiences in and out of the classroom. The book captures Werbel’s Chinese students in their own words as they grapple with America’s tragic and transcendent past and, in doing so, inevitably reflect upon their own country’s past, present, and future.

Teaching critical thinking is no small feat in any cultural context, but China poses particular challenges. The life-altering college entrance examination (gaokao) epitomizes a systematic emphasis on memorization. (The test is virtually the sole determinant of a student’s university placement and subsequent professional opportunities, and it provokes anxieties that have led to cheating scandals and even alleged attacks on exam proctors.) According to Werbel, many of her students had never read primary sources in a history class. Their previous assignments had apparently consisted of regurgitating scholarship from sources vetted by the state’s education bureaucracy.

Werbel is frank about the challenges and limitations in reaching her students. In a unit on American westward expansion, Chinese student perspectives mirrored the attitudes of most 19th Century Americans. It was possible to get students to empathize with Native Americans but more difficult to see both native and settler communities as equally “civilized” and deserving of a self-defined future.

Chinese ethnic minorities have chafed under their government’s campaign to develop the country’s Western provinces in part through settlement of Han Chinese. During the American westward expansion unit and other periods covered in Werbel’s courses, there is an unmistakable sense of déjà vu. It would be nice to think that certain aspects of the U.S. experience could serve as a cautionary tale. But for those of us who may think that mere access to information can undo China’s social contradictions — such as the persistent Han-Uyghur divide — this book provides a healthy dose of humility.

Some of the most profound “lessons” of the book come when Werbel’s students teach their professor (and the reader) to view American history in a new light. In their analysis of Fredrick Douglass’ autobiography, for example, many students shared the assumption that a person could not be whole without the identity that comes from family and place. One student wrote in English that removal of a slave child from his or her family “is more serious than the segregation or even the genocide because it avoids the cultural links, the inner spiritual essence, be instilled into the new generation [sic].” Only after Werbel visits a family temple in an outlying village during the Spring Festival holiday does she realize how keenly her students empathize with Douglass, who never had the opportunity to know his ancestral home.

The course unit covering America’s conflict in Vietnam and the Anti-War Movement challenged students. They tended to expect democracy to produce “virtuous” policy outcomes, and when it did not, they strained to understand how this could be possible. One student’s written response managed to capture the complexity of the time with the following insight:

The majority of American people considered antiwar protestors as unpatriotic or even traitorous because for them it seemed that if you loved your country enough you should have faith in your mother country and in what it was doing…. But to those antiwar protestors, whose number increased as the war proceeded, patriotism meant fighting for the good of the country and stretching out for justice. They saw their loss in the Vietnam War and wanted to put an end to it, which, to my understanding, is a more rational kind of patriotism.

This nuanced view of patriotism — historically rare in the Chinese context and still highly controversial — has begun to creep into mainstream discourse. In a similar vein, on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, lawyer and activist Yuan Yulai (@袁裕来律师) recently tweeted:

Some netizens ask me: ‘You are always criticizing the Chinese government and society, but you never criticize America. Is American really that perfect?’ I answer: I couldn’t say whether America is perfect. I am a Chinese citizen, so it’s my responsibility to criticize the Chinese government and society. This kind of criticism is based upon a profound love of my country. I am not CCTV or the Global Times. I do not have this kind of love for America, nor do I have this responsibility to criticize America.

Yuan’s tweet went viral with more than 35 thousand retweets, ten thousand comments, and 4,753 thumbs up. Today, China’s blogosphere can provide a platform for conversation and exchange of ideas not altogether unlike Professor Werbel’s classroom.

Of course, the Web is no substitute for face-to-face engagement. Upon completing Lessons from China, the reader is left with an appreciation for the value of international exchange programs like Fulbright. In introducing the fellowship that bears his name, Senator William Fulbright suggested that regular and ongoing intellectual exchange would “continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace — eventually even in cooperation in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction.”

While Professor Werbel does not claim to have ended the world’s “mindless contests,” both she and her students gained a bit more mutual empathy and exercised their abilities to see the world as others see it. This kind of emotional intelligence will be critical if both countries are to operate successfully in this interconnected century.