In the 20 years since its launch, the Asia-Pacific's top economic grouping has witnessed a stunning realignment with China on the march and the United States mired in crisis.
President Barack Obama heads to Singapore for this week's annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting with the US recovery painfully slow, the dollar on shaky ground, and US diplomatic standing in need of repair.
Unlike the United States, China was not a founding member of APEC when the club was launched in November 1989, five months after the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown made the Asian country an international pariah.
When it did join in 1991, China was still in transition from a centrally planned economy, but is now striking an increasingly confident pose on the world stage.
Poised to become the world's second-largest economy, it is exerting its influence everywhere - financing America's debt, becoming a top buyer of natural resources, and making its voice heard on major diplomatic issues.
But despite its reduced circumstances, the United States has a long history of leadership in the region and is still the major marketplace for goods produced by export-dependent Asia-Pacific nations.
"We believe America plays an indispensable role in Asia in many fields - economic, political, strategic, security," APEC host Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said last week.
"We've been talking about a multipolar world, but de facto the US is the most powerful nation in the world and will be so for some time to come," said Lee, who will welcome 20 other leaders for the November 14-15 APEC summit.
Lee's comments came amid debate about the US role in various proposed free-trade zones and economic communities, including a Japanese-sponsored East Asian Community in which Washington's involvement is unclear.
Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center in Hawaii, said regional nations were content with the current balance in US-China relations.
"Asian nations don't want to make choices and so they're very comfortable in the framework where the US and China get along together," he said.
"But it's a very natural thing that, if you're a smaller power, you want to be able to play off to some extent the larger powers but don't want a conflict that forces you to take sides."
Morrison said the United States also carries into this APEC summit the trump card of a "very articulate, popular young leader" in Obama, whose debut presidential tour of Asia will take him to China after Singapore.
Huang Yiping, professor of economics at Peking University in Beijing and a former chief Asia economist with Citigroup, said China would face challenges as it begins to exert its influence more heavily.
"Obviously the economy is growing significantly and its influence is rising very rapidly.
"But the issue China will have to deal with is whether or not we are ready to play a leadership role in regional or global affairs and that's something I think we need to be a bit careful about," he said.
"As a decision-maker you have to make choices. The strategy the Chinese government adopted 30 years ago was that we just want to focus on economic development and we don't want trouble.
"Going forward there may be some difficult stages for China as well."
Huang said that Asia-Pacific nations simply cannot afford to turn their back on the vast US economy and its diversified financial system.
"The US takes more than 20 per cent of the finished exports from Asia and China takes about six per cent so I don't think it's an equal competition," he said.
"The US will continue to play a very significant role in the region, even though its relative importance is declining and the importance of the other developing economies is rising."
APEC comprises Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.
