Trump will pursue ‘regional hegemony’ in South China Sea: Chinese academics

The country’s government oversaw the worst crackdown on dissent in almost three decades.

During the U.S. election campaign, Trump repeatedly criticised Japan, as well as China, as an unfair trading partner and, along with South Korea, suggested that it did not pay enough towards the cost of American military bases on its soil. They tightened controls over the Internet, freezing out foreign firms while allowing their domestic competitors to prosper.

In the Obama era, Washington began to tout the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

New Zealand and China announced at the APEC leaders’ conference in Peru that they had agreed to renegotiate the historic free trade agreement between the two countries. -China relations in particular can have undesirable consequences. (Whether Boeing will get those orders depends on how quickly its agreement to build a plant in China makes that country self-sufficient and even an global competitor.) Apple has important manufacturing facilities in China. It’s a big responsibility …

“Factor one is whether China has the capacity to be leader, and factor two is whether China has the willingness to be leader”, said Chen Dingding, professor of global relations at Jinan University in Guangzhou.

For Chinese leaders, any sign of pragmatism from the US president-elect should allay fears of a calamitous rupture in Sino-American relations. However, he and other analysts said the conclusions were still relevant.

Trump’s action will not kill TPP stone dead, but it will rob the nascent trade pact of its cornerstone participant, and its raison d’etre from an American perspective – which was to give expression to a U.S. pivot to Asia and provide a counterweight for China’s rise.

The RCEP covers the usual components of a free trade deal, such as trade in goods, services, investment, and intellectual property rights protection.

In 2000, America’s unions persuaded the government to require trucks bearing goods from Mexico to offload them at the border and reload them onto US trucks driven by union members, in contravention of the NAFTA agreement.

What Trump is proposing throws a spanner in the works of a trade initiative that has taken years to negotiate and involved intricate negotiations on highly complex market-access issues as a model trade pact with vast potential benefit for participants.

IN President Barack Obama has stressed that for the USA to turn its back on the TPP would be to allow China to write the rules in global economic engagement. Apart from a sharp reduction in economic size, the TPP would lose its strength as a geo-strategic alliance in the region.

Trump’s dismissal of the pact “leaves a gap”, said Claire Reade, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I think the answer is yes”.

So why hasn’t the current administration worked harder to push back against Beijing in the South China Sea? The U.S. typically ties its worldwide aid and loans to causes such as gender equality, government transparency and human rights – issues on which China’s authoritarian leaders rarely engage.

Chinese investments in Latin America will not touch the “US investment cheese” in the continent, Liu said, but will help improve the continent’s investment environment.

China has reason to defend globalization.

While many experts and scholars can readily recite a laundry list of reasons for growing tensions in the U.S. -Sino relationship, there is only one that counts: Beijing has determined that it no longer needs to bide its time or hide its capabilities, evidenced by China’s opposition to a U.S. led global system in the Asia-Pacific.

“We hope to play a leading role in the fight against protectionism”, Monji said, adding Canada and Japan share a desire for free trade and if many countries ratify the TPP, “it will send a signal to the United States”. American agricultural exporters, too, would suffer because China is one of their largest overseas markets.

President-elect Donald Trump in a video statement last week said he asked his transition team to come up with a list of executive actions to be ready for his first day in office. Part of Trump’s business empire sells clothes made in the Far East, including China.

In the late 1980s, as the Cold War eclipsed in Europe and regional trade blocks surfaced around the world, Australia called for more effective economic cooperation across Asia Pacific, which led to the first APEC talks.

“We are not forgetting the bilateral Economic Partnership Agreement”, Monji said in an interview.

Noland suggested that the Mexican government is also working on how to respond to potential trade barriers of the USA, arguing they will not be as effective as China’s missiles but can undermine Trump’s policies on illegal immigration.

China needs better IP protection enforcement so USA firms feel comfortable selling their value-added products in the country without fear of them being stolen.