SYDNEY (AP) — US President George W. Bush used an address before an audience of Pacific Rim business elite to discuss the war on terror. Chinese President Hu Jintao talked about the business opportunities China's growth is producing.

The differing messages, and the different reviews they received this week, underscore a widening perception gap about the United States and China: Around the Asia-Pacific region, even in an Australia that is a staunch American ally, US engagement appears to be slipping while China is seen as the power of the future. "Politics does not exist in a vacuum, and whenever there is a vacuum, somebody else is going to fill that, whether it is China or India or some others," Ricardo Lagos Escobar, the former president of Chile, said after listening to Hu's speech Thursday.

"But it is very clear that what has happened during the last years has been the growing influence of the Chinese economy."

The terror attacks in 2001 and the war in Iraq drew Washington's attentions from Asia, critics say, just as China's historic re-emergence gained critical mass. Its economy running at a better than ten percent clip, China has huge purchasing power and is an engine of growth for the region, buoying economies from Canada to Malaysia.

Along the way Beijing has picked up influence, preaching a business-first message that multinationals like and that avoids the security and democracy issues the Bush administration dwells on. "China's sound and steady economic growth has not only benefited China's 1.3 billion people, but also offered enormous business opportunities to other countries," Hu told the gathering of 300 business leaders Thursday.

At the same podium Friday, Bush briefly discussed trade, preferring to focus on the threat terrorism poses to economic prosperity. He confused the occasion for the speech, thanking Australia for inviting him to an OPEC summit of oil exporters, instead of the APEC summit of Asia-Pacific economies that brought him to Sydney. He called Australians "Austrians" and fumbled the name of Myanmar's democratic opposition leader.

Perceptions of a distracted US and a rising China have dogged the Bush administration all week, putting it on the defensive. As Bush headed to Australia — making a surprise stop in Iraq on the way — former State Department official Richard Armitage decried Washington's preoccupation with Iraq at Asia's expense in an interview with The Australian newspaper.

Bush was asked aboard Air Force One whether "this was China's summit?" "Absolutely not," Bush replied. After arrival in Sydney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went on Australian television to defend the administration as "extremely involved in Asia."

Unconvinced, Greg Sheridan, the often pro-Bush foreign editor of The Australian, panned the president's performance at a news conference in Sydney this week noting he barely mentioned Asia. "Overall you'd have to say the press conference illustrates the increasing tin ear of the Bush administration in Asia," Sheridan wrote Thursday.

Such reviews of a visiting US president would have been unheard of until recently in Australia. Affinities between the two countries run deep. Australia has struggled with its Anglo roots to redefine itself as an Asian country. Though Bush is unpopular because of Iraq and Australia's participation in the war, he has attracted more media attention than Hu or any of the 16 other visiting heads of government attending the summit.

But China is more often depicted as Australia's economic lifeline and future, a resource-hungry giant that needs Australia's raw materials.