China looks to seize Asian trade leadership after Trump win

Setting aside tough talk from both candidates on the campaign trail about standing up to China, Trump will face the same question as previous presidents regarding U.S.

Donald Trump doesn’t enter the White House until January 20, but China’s leaders are already dancing in their Beijing offices. A wider strategic dialogue will improve the Pentagon’s ability to assess China’s military capabilities.

SCHMITZ: Great for the US because it creates jobs and good for China because it would continue to export goods to America without trade barriers.

The U.S. pivot to the Asia-Pacific in the Obama Administration has concentrated on reinforcing traditional alliances, redeploying Navy forces, and creating multilateral cooperation mechanisms, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

“We think that calling China a currency manipulator probably has a reasonable chance (of happening), but in itself it does not really carry a lot of sanction”. Now Singapore, which Barack Obama referred to as “an anchor for the USA presence in Asia”, is likely to face a hard situation after Donald Trump takes office and Singapore’s export-oriented economy is likely to be profoundly impacted.

Trump told supporters that China keeps its currency artificially low to flood the US with cheap imports, putting Americans out of work. Governments there will work with whoever is in power in the U.S. Flawed trade agreements have closed factories and offshored jobs, devastating communities in OH and across the country.

During his first Asian trip as president, in 2009, Barack Obama said, “t$3 here must be no doubt”. I urge you to live up to those promises.

Mr Trump has cast uncertainty on the postwar world order with his vows to tear up or renegotiate global free trade agreements in order to protect United States jobs. Unfortunately, mounting suspicions have undermined the Sino-U.S. relationship and stability and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific.

Candidate Trump’s criticism of American allies generally and of Japan and South Korea in particular also reflected an emergent body of nativist opinion in the United States which eschews global commitments and belittles the strengths of the US alliance system.

Critics say such fears about Chinese investment in the USA overlook the economic benefits, including tens of thousands of jobs. And American manufacturers have been harmed by provisions that allow antidumping and countervailing duty determinations to be reviewed.

The more recent debacle over TPP negotiating authority and ratification further confirms that USA trade policy is a complete mess. TPP’s rules of origin are significantly weaker and more porous than those in NAFTA. All will become stakeholders in better U.S. However, among some Japanese officials, there had been ideas that TPP could be transformed into a US-Japan bilateral agreement that could have the new Administration’s stamp, set a higher bar, which others could join later.

No one knows how Trump will act as President. Both should proceed-indeed, the plan has always been that they would one day merge into a vast Asia-Pacific free-trade area.

Regardless of the evidence of the benefits of free trade, there appears to be little love for the free trade (or freer trade) agenda on the basis that it is perceived as being contrary to the interests of the USA, its citizens, its industries and employment prospects.

Australia could get a big boost from trade with China, which would now look for new trading partners.

In July, the USA raised anti-dumping duties on photovoltaic products from China. What’s clear, he says, is that a trade war would be disastrous for China because it would lead to either higher debt or tens of millions of lost jobs.

“If you intervene in trade, that’s probably good for the USA, certainly bad for China”, Pettis says.

Comparatively, the finalized TPP proposal was signed by the 12 member states – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam – in February. So the worst case scenario is dissolution, and the less worse scenario is renegotiation. The U.S. aluminum supply chain is similarly in crisis from China’s trade violations, and we need to respond aggressively to prevent more layoffs. One of Trump’s campaign advisors, Peter Navarro, a professor of economics and public policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, is known to put American industrial decline on Chinese shoulders alone. The Chinese government maintains significant control over its economy, especially in critical sectors such as the steel, aluminum, and tire sectors, among others.

America’s manufacturers are urging President-elect Donald Trump to back off from his most threatening trade rhetoric and pursue a more nuanced approach to trade with China and Mexico, avoiding unilateral tariff actions and focusing on negotiations.

Philippine President Duterte has said the Philippine military will cancel some joint military exercises with the USA military and seek to develop friendly relations with China. In June, the Republican called the existing North American Free Trade Agreement “the worst trade deal in the history of the country” and likened the TPP to a “rape” of the USA economy.

He defied all the major polls, which nearly unanimously predicted another Clinton back in the White House, and he showed that his racially-tinged rhetoric represented the views of the American majority, via the electoral college at least, and he also caused the global economy to go into a momentary tailspin after his win. An individual with manufacturing expertise will bring the appropriate perspective of domestic production and employment to an agency that has been focused on helping corporations make profits overseas.

“Is China now acting as a de facto fundraiser for the US?”, Professor Anis H. Bajrektarevic asked in his policy paper ‘What China wants for Asia: 1975 or 1908?’.

Some think that the USA will not afford to raise tariffs on Chinese goods since that would hurt world trade, considering the intertwined value chain in manufacturing. The US’s concern is more global, having to do with its world image and its trade and investment interests.