Chinese state media urges Trump not to act on trade rhetoric

If Donald Trump turns his back on Asian economies, China is ready and willing to step into the vacuum.

Trump’s triumph in this month’s USA presidential poll has raised concerns that years of rolling back trade barriers could be reversed after the populist billionaire vowed to tear up a series of key deals.

Mr Trump has described the TPP – a massive trade deal involving 12 countries including the United States and Australia – as a “job killer” and “a disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country”. Trump has vowed to roll back environmental funding and put in stricter immigration rules.

“The governments in Asia are all very anxious”, said Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for worldwide and Strategic Studies and former senior Asia director at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. But the deal, between the United States and 11 Asian and Pacific nations, was never just about trade.

China isn’t waiting around for the TPP’s funeral. On his final day in Peru, Obama sought to reassure the leaders gathered here that their longstanding ties with the US wouldn’t falter under Trump.

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly accused China of keeping the yuan undervalued to boost exports and threatened to declare Beijing a currency manipulator once in office.

When Jabil Circuit Inc., the world/’s third-largest contract manufacturer by revenue, needed to quickly ramp up production of its electronics components a few years ago, the company was able to add 35,000 workers in China in less than six weeks.

But Mr Key also earnestly argued that in the face of Mr Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric, world leaders needed to double-down on their negotiating efforts.

Still, it remains to be seen how China might develop a greater leadership role on the two issues and profit from a retreating America under Trump.

The RCEP’s large economic size – it accounts for a third of the global GDP and nearly half of the world’s population – makes it a significant economic framework. Signed earlier this year, the TPP was meant to eliminate 18,000 taxes, in the form of tariffs, opening up growth opportunities for USA agriculture and textiles and protect workers’ rights and intellectual property.

In a region hungry for trade, this has left even longtime USA allies looking to a once unlikely place to fill the void: China, which was excluded from TPP.

“This is an important point in recent economic history because of the outcome of various elections in very important countries that have reflected an anti-trade, anti-openness feeling”, he said.

He won’t have the opportunity to sell his rename to Mr Trump at APEC though – Barack Obama is there on behalf of the US.

That may come when Obama joins other leaders for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Lima, Peru, on Saturday and Sunday.

His pitch escalated Beijing’s efforts to woo former USA allies away from their enlistment in the USA “pivot” against China by promising investment and commercial opportunities.

“Beijing is understandably relieved that the exclusive, economically inefficient, politically antagonizing TPP is looking ever less likely to materialize by the day”, said an editorial this week in state-run English-language newspaper China Daily.

He will also meet fellow TPP leaders, Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynskil and Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, as well as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is facing Mr Trump’s pledge to renegotiate the long standing NAFTA agreement between Mexico, Canada and the U.S. as well as the TPP.

Obama said he and Trudeau are going to try and get as much work completed on thinning the borders during the last two months of his presidency. “I’m not sure it’s a net positive for China”.