China eyes opportunity as US pulls out of Trans-Pacific Partnership

Washington: President Donald Trump's formal withdrawal from the long-planned Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with Pacific Rim nations creates a political and economic vacuum that China is eager to fill, offering a boost for beleaguered US manufacturing regions while damaging American prestige in Asia.

The move is a sledgehammer blow to former President Barack Obama's attempt to recentre US foreign policy from the Mideast to Asia.

As the Trump administration retreats from the region by ending US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China's Communist leaders are ramping up their globalisation efforts and championing the virtues of free trade.

In an address last week to the World Economic Forum at Davos, Chinese president Xi Jinping likened protectionism to "locking oneself in a dark room" and signalled that China would look to negotiate regional trade deals.

China is advocating for a 16-nation pact called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that excludes the United States and lacks some of the environmental and labour protections Obama negotiated into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Xi and other Chinese leaders are also looking to fill the US leadership vacuum, taking advantage of Trump's protectionism to boost ties with traditional US allies like the Philippines and Malaysia.

"The US is now basically in a position where we had our horse, the Chinese had their horse - but our horse has been put out to pasture and is no longer running in the race," said Eric Altbach, vice president at Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington and a former deputy assistant US Trade Representative for China Affairs.

"It's a giant gift to the Chinese because they now can pitch themselves as the driver of trade liberalisation."

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican who chairs the Armed Services Committee, ripped Trump's decision. Obama's last defence secretary, Ash Carter, once said that the Asia-Pacific trade pact would be more strategically valuable than another aircraft carrier battle group in the Pacific.

US withdrawal from the pact "will create an opening for China to rewrite the economic rules of the road at the expense of American workers," McCain said. "And it will send a troubling signal of American disengagement in the Asia-Pacific region at a time we can least afford it."

Obama saw TPP as "much more than an agreement that would increase international trade," according to Jack Thompson, a senior researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in Zurich.

The pact was a crucial initiative "to build and maintain long-term relationships to reassure the other nations in the region," he said in an email.

It's a giant gift to the Chinese because they now can pitch themselves as the driver of trade liberalisation.

But Trump's withdrawal "directly undermines all of this careful work and gives China yet another opportunity to demonstrate that it represents the future of the security and economic system in East Asia, and that the US is in decline and can't be counted on to stick around," Thompson said.

China's 16-nation RECP would include southeast Asia countries, as well as Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India.

While it reduces tariffs, it wouldn't require its members to take steps to liberalise their economies, protect labour rights and environmental standards or protect intellectual property.

Developing nations within the agreement are also given more time to comply with regulations that do exist.

"It's an opportunity for China to defer its own reforms and use its own system as a model to draw other countries closer to its orbit," Dan Ikenson, the director of the Cato institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Centre for Trade Policy Studies, said in a phone interview.

Leaders from Australia, Malaysia, and other nations who had championed TPP quickly signalled, following Trump's election, that they would shift their attention to the RECP.

When Obama tried to garner support for TPP in the US, he regularly warned that failure to pass the deal would allow Beijing to replace Washington in driving the rules of global trade. And his Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the passage of RECP would lead to the loss of market share among US industries that now export more than $US5 billion in goods to Japan.

Democratic Opposition

But the trade deal never had overwhelming support in Congress, where many Democrats applauded Trump for withdrawing from it on Monday.

"I am glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone," Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who campaigned for president as a Democrat on the same promise to scrap the deal, said in a statement. "For the last 30 years, we have had a series of trade deals -- including the North American Free Trade Agreement, permanent normal trade relations with China and others -- which have cost us millions of decent-paying jobs and caused a 'race to the bottom' which has lowered wages for American workers."

The ramifications of Trump's move could extend beyond trade. Asian leaders are stung that after investing political capital in the US-led trade deal, America was unable to follow through, and have signalled a new wariness that could extend to other aspects of the relationship.

Killing TPP "really undermines the United States" in the eyes of Asian allies, Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia group, said in a phone interview.

"They put a lot of effort into it, and now they feel like they can't rely on the United States," he said.

Countries in both Asia and Latin America are saying that "if they can't get the US to commit to a deal, then screw it, they're going to China," Bremmer said.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, during his visit to the White House in August, warned that abandoning the agreement would damage every part of Japanese-US relations, including the military alliance between the countries.

"The Japanese, living in an uncertain world, depending on an American nuclear umbrella, will have to say, on trade, the Americans could not follow through; if it's life and death, whom do I have to depend upon?" Lee said. "It's an absolutely serious calculation, which will not be said openly, but I have no doubts will be thought."

Bloomberg