Skip to main content

China on the Doorstep of the TPP

The signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a major Asian trade agreement, in November 2020, was remarkable because India decided not to take part in it while Japan was determined to strike a deal with China, despite the difficult political transition underway in Washington. Some questions arose at that time. Would the EU show as much autonomy from the United States on the Euro-Chinese economic negotiation front? Would India eventually join the RCEP? Would the United States return to the competing transpacific project? Would China also seek to join also the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)?

TPP’s variable geometry

In December 2020 came the first reaction from the European Union, which signed the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investments (CAI), ignoring a request from Joe Biden’s new presidency to stall the proceedings. On September 16th, 2021 the question regarding China was also answered when it officially requested to join the TPP.

The history of the TPP began in 2005, with a nucleus of four small nations: Singapore, New Zealand, Chile and Brunei. The entry of George Bush Jr.’s USA in 2008 and Shinzo Abe’s Japan in 2013 radically transformed the transpacific negotiations, which grew to a global scale to meet other mega-regional trade initiatives. The official signing of the TPP took place in 2016, on the decisive impetus of President Barack Obama, who, however, failed to obtain its ratification by Congress.

An unpredictable twist came in 2017 with US withdrawal, ordered by Donald Trump at the outset of his presidency. In an initial show of persistence, perhaps incentivised by the US goverment itself, Tokyo took the wheel of the transpacific agreement, guiding it towards the finish line in 2018, and renamed it as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Despite having been abandoned by the United States, the TPP survived, and has recently attracted the interest of further Asian nations — although the first official bid for membership after its ratification is geographically incongruous, coming from the United Kingdom. In June, Boris Johnson’s government kickstarted negotiations to enter the CPTPP, at whose doorstep now looms the bulky silhouette of China — the world’s largest trading power.

A mixed reception

The TPP has always been touted as an agreement which is open to any naton willing to abide by its rules; nevertheless, it is expected that any new membership request would be contingent on the unanimous consent of existing member states. Initial official reactions to China’s application were mixed. The openness of Singapore and Malaysia contrasted to the coldness of the Japanese government, which responded by stressing the high standards of the TPP. That is — besides the elimination of most customs dutes — the rules against state subsidies to industry, the protection of intellectual property, the free circulation of digital data, the liberalisation of public procurement, the rights of union organisation, etc. All these features are considered incompatible with the Chinese regime.

Trade Minister Dan Than stipulated a specific precondition from Australia: the reopening of bilateral negotiations between Canberra and Beijing, which were interrupted when China responded with tariffs and sanctions to Australian calls for a probe into the origins of the pandemic in China. According to some sources, Beijing would not have risked a formal request without prior assurances from TPP member governments. Other analysts think that China is happy to stir up an internal dilemma within the transpacific area, whose members do not want to antagonise either Washington or Beijing. The equation became even more complicated when, on September 22nd, Taiwan also put itself forward for candidacy. Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi welcomed Taiwan as a very important partner with which we share fundamental values such as freedom, democracy, basic human rights […]. The Chinese government immediately reaffirmed the one-China policy, rejecting any international recognition of Taiwanese autonomy.

A liberist China

China’s entry into the TPP would further increase the overlap with the rival RCEP agreement. The Diplomat goes so far as to argue that many members of the transpacific area do not have a suffcient interest in accommodating Beijing, as they already enjoy trade arrangements with China through the RCEP. In reality, the dispute over mega-regional agreements has many aspects that are not strictly economic. So much so that, in the most widely accepted interpretation, China’s candidature for the TPP is seen as an immediate reaction to the AUKUS military agreement announced by the US, the UK and Australia. As Washington reaffirms its strategic presence in the Pacific, Beijing is highlighting the American absence from trade agreements in the area.

In the interpretation of the Chinese daily Global Times [September 17th], the Beijing government aims to cement China’s leadership role in global trade, while piling pressure on the US which is absent from the TPP. It is significant that China’s initial response to an American move in the rearmament process is of a liberist nature, and embodies the old Washington Consensus in aiming for trade liberalisation. The Chinese countermove, according to Le Figaro [September 18th], sends indeed the message: Do business, not war.

To the obstacle of standards, China counters with the classic argument of an external constriction functional to the Chinese line of reform and opening up. Beijing seems to take it for granted that entry into the TPP implies lengthy negotiations. In the Global Times they go so far as to speak of a ten-year period. This is a long time, consistent with the idea that entry into the TPP for China would be somewhat alike to its accession to the WTO, which it joined twenty years ago.

Waiting for Biden

At the beginning of the year, there was considerable pressure within the United States for the new Biden presidency to make a clean break with Trump’s trade policy. Bringing the United States back into the TPP was an explicit request from the major business associations and infuential think tanks of bipartisan tradition.

Back in June, this priority motivated a contribution to The Washington Post by Senators Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, and John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas. China is seriously considering applying to the TPP, the two senators warned: Such a possibility would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when the United States was leading the way in carefully crafting this trade agreement, in large part to counter China’s growing economic and geopolitical dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. President Biden should negotiate a return to the TPP because US trade leadership in the Asia-Pacific is an imperative for our country’s economy, national security and broader diplomatic efforts [The Washington Post, June 15th, 2021].

More recently, pressure from the business world has returned in the form of several letters to the White House, but the demand relating to TPP participation seems to have been shelved. replaced by a call to ease tariffs inherited from Trump and define a clear political stance regarding China. It seems that the big American groups have resigned themselves to the idea that Biden does not intend to make contentious international trade choices until he has succeded in consolidating, or at least preserving, his slim congressional majority in the midterm elections. Meanwhile, The Economist and many other liberal voices express bitter disappointment at the perceived continuity in trade agenda between Trump and Biden.

Kissinger’s options

Will China’s application to the TPP change Biden’s approach? For the United States, the answer is not limited to the binary of joining or not joining the CPTPP. Even if we stick to trade agreements alone, the White House has a large, multifaceted tactical arsenal of these. A clue can be found in the variety of positions held over the last decade by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who can be considered as the ultimate embodiment of American strategic thinking.

Kissinger stated that his preference was for a Sino-American coexistence in an Asia-Pacific Community as we reported in our newspaper [Internationalist Bulletin, July 2009]. In 2012, in an essay in Foreign Affairs, Kissinger saw the transpacific negotiations as a potential step in the right direction. Obama has invited China to join the TPP. However, the terms of accession as presented by American briefers and commentators have sometimes seemed to require fundamental changes in China’s domestic structure. To the extent that is the case, the TPP could be regarded in Beijing as part of a strategy to isolate China [Foreign Affairs, March-April 2012]. As Beijing worked on alternative agreements (such as the recent RCEP) there was a risk that the Asia-Pacific could be divided into competing adversarial power blocs

In 2015, Kissinger sided with President Obama, along with former Secretries of State Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and James Baker, for a bipartisan call to Congress in favour of the TPP. In Obama’s words, those protagonists of American foreign policy agree that if we fail to get the TPP done, if we do not create the architecture for high-standards trade and commerce in this region, then that void will be filled by China, it will be filled by our economic competitors. They will make the rules, and those rules will not be at our advantage (November 13th, 2015].

TPP or phase two?

In 2016, in an interview with The Atlantic, Kissinger returned to argue against the idea of containing China. It is important for us to be present in Asia in political, economic, and social ways. We cannot talk about equilibrium in Asia unless we establish some of the preconditions for it, like [the] TPP. But it should also be open to China. And it should be understood that China can be part of it so that whatever economic contest we have with China will be within a framework of a cooperative option [The Atlantic, November 2016]. Kissinger advocated an open transpacific initiative, yet he maintained his endorsement of Trump, who rejected the very same option. Indeed, in January 2020, Kissinger sat in the front row at the signing of the US-China phase one agreement, snatched up by the Trump presidency after drag ging China through years of tariff offensives, sanctions and betrayed truces.

Obviously this brief and partial review does not do justice to the complexity of Kissinger’s strategic thinking, but it helps us to contemplate the variety of forms, ways and times that Biden’s trade policy could take. If China is accepted into a TPP that will exclude the United States, it will be a resounding setback for America — though this does not seem a likely scenario. However, if one focuses only on the TPP test for Biden, they forget that a response to China could also come through direct US-China negotiations, thus continuing Trump’s bilateral approach.

Will we see a US-China phase two agreement as an alternative, in parallel with or prior to an eventual US return to the TPP? Given the huge variety of tactical options and entanglements with US election timing, Biden will not be able to evade the China test

Lotta Comunista, September 2021

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Chinese Rearmament Projects Itself in Asia

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 5 From the series Asian giants Trends in rearmament spending and comparisons of military equipment are increasingly set to dominate coverage of the contention between powers in the crisis in the world order . The military factor has entered the strategic debate, accompanied by a wealth of figures and technical details. The increase in military spending as a percentage of GDP represents a widespread sign of the rearmament cycle at this juncture, but spending alone cannot entirely explain the situation, given the qualitatively different natures of the arsenals being compared. Nor are comparisons between this or that type of weapon useful in themselves, because ultimately all weapons are only ever used in combination with the complex military means available to a power, either in alliance or in conflict with other powers in the system of States. Therefore, while it is difficult to assess the real significa...
Read more

Uneven Development, Job Cuts, and the Crisis of Labour Under Global Capitalism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 16 Uneven development is a fundamental law of capitalism. We have a macroscopic expression of this in the changing balance of power between States: Atlantic decline and Asian rise are the key dynamics behind the political processes of this era, including wars caused by the crisis in the world order. But behind all this there is a differentiated economic trend, starting from companies and sectors: hence the differentiated conditions for wage earners. And this is the element to keep in mind for an effective defensive struggle. It’s only the beginning The electrical and digital restructuring imposed by global market competition affects various production sectors. The car industry is the most obvious, due to the familiarity of the companies and brands involved. We have already reported on the agreement reached before Christmas at Volkswagen, which can be summarised as a reduction of 35,000 employees by 2030. Die Zeit [De...
Read more

Political Battles of European Leninism

Internationalism No. 73, March 2025 Page 1 Thirty years after the death of Arrigo Cervetto , we are publishing here the concluding passages of the introduction to his Opere Scelte (“Selected Works”) for the series Biblioteca Giovani (“Publications for young people”), soon to be published in Italian. The 1944-45 partisan war in Italy. The political battle within libertarian communism. The Korean War, and the watchword of “neither Washington nor Moscow”. The layoffs at the Ilva and Ansaldo factories, the political battle and trade union defence in the struggles of post-war restructuring. From 1953 onwards, the crisis of Stalinism, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Hungarian uprising, the 1957 Theses and the challenge of theory and strategy vis-à-vis the tendencies of unitary imperialism. The political struggle within Azione Comunista (“Communist Action”) and the Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (“Movement of the Communist Left”). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, t...
Read more

German Socialism in 1917

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement  According to Arrigo Cervetto [ Opere , Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”. The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe . “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”. “But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in Russia and the economic, productive, and social conditions in Germany – “for ...
Read more

Class Consciousness and Crisis in the World Order

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Pages 1 and 2 The consciousness of the proletariat “cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population”. If it concentrates exclusively “or even mainly” upon itself alone, the proletariat cannot be revolutionary, “for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society”. For this reason, the worker “must have a clear picture in ...
Read more

Historical Constants and Strategic Surprise

The Strategic Surprise of the Agreement between Beijing and Tehran and the Suggestion of a Six-Power Concert The agreement between Beijing and Tehran falls under the definition of strategic surprise , i.e., events that entirely appertain to the political realm and mark a change or an about-turn in the balance among the powers. New alliances, the breakdown of alliances, the overturning of coalitions, diplomatic openings or unexpected military sorties: these are the regular novelties of international politics that Arrigo Cervetto wrote about. However, if the agreement was an unforeseeable event in itself, the long-term objective economic and political trends. that have determined it and made it possible are entirely investigable. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of December 1979 was interpreted by the United States as a potential threat to the oil routes of the Persian Gulf, and it was a contemporary revival of the Great Game , which had set the British Empire agai...
Read more

Bolsonaro Squeezed between Pandemic, Lula Card and Armed Forces

This article is taken from Intervenção Comunista — the journal of our Brazilian comrades We wrote in May last year that the ‘tropical Trump’ causes a perfect storm . This first quarter of the year seems to demonstrate this clearly: GDP decline (-4.1%) and increased unemployment (14.2%); an end to emergency aid and a delay in the resumption of a new, much leaner aid plan; a record number of deaths and Covid infections. With 2.7% of the world’s population, the country accounts for about 12% of Covid-19 deaths. In March alone, Brazil recorded an increase of about 33% in its daily deaths. The pandemic crisis, coupled with historical imbalances, is shaking up the dysfunctional government of Jair Bolsonaro, who has just appointed his fourth health minister in a year. Increased dependence on the Centrão The second half of Bolsonaro’s term began — for their politics — with the election of Arthur Lira (Progressive Party-Alagoas) as president of the Chamber of Deputies, and Rodrigo Pac...
Read more

Price War in the US and EU

Internationalism No. 78-79, August-September 2025 Page 7 From the series Industry and pharmaceuticals The contention in the biopharmaceutical field between the two sides of the Atlantic addresses the issue of costs, in two different ways. In a letter to the Financial Times published on April 23rd, Vas Narasimhan and Paul Hudson, the CEOs of Swiss company Novartis and French company Sanofi respectively, presented a harsh diagnosis of the state of European biopharmaceuticals compared to their major competitors, the United States and China. Narasimhan, an American son of immigrants from Tamil Nadu, and Hudson, a Briton, head two of the world's ten largest pharmaceutical multinationals. The two executives see "a strong outlook for the US – thanks to policies and regulations conducive to fast and broad patient access to innovative medicines". In contrast, Europe, "while home to some of the most important biopharma companies in the world"...
Read more

Forces and Consequences of the New Strategic Phase

The new strategic phase in the world balance, with its new corresponding political cycles within powers, requires attention to the materialistic, historical and dialectical method of political analysis itself. The changing forces and basic trends need to be identified; we can make conjectures about the developments in single political battles, but the outcome of these battles will always require us to contemplate a plurality of solutions: some more probable. others less. but never Just a mechanical consequence of long-term economic movements. Many fixed points of the method of political analysis are usual tools in our Marxist elaboration, but this does not mean they must be taken for granted: it is of use to recall them, in relation to the new unknowns of the political battle. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from t...
Read more

The Defeat in Afghanistan — a Watershed in the Cycle of Atlantic Decline

In crises and wars there are events which leave their mark on history because of how they make a decisive impact on the power contention, or because of how, almost like a chemical precipitate, they suddenly make deep trends that have been at work for some time coalesce. This is the case of the defeat of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, which is taking the shape of a real watershed in the cycle of Atlantic decline. For the moment, through various comments in the international press, it is possible to consider its consequences on three levels: America’s position as a power and the connection with its internal crisis; the repercussions on Atlantic relations and Europe’s dilemmas regarding its strategic autonomy; and the relationship between the Afghan crisis and power relations in Asia, especially as regards India’s role in the Indo-Pacific strategy. Repercussions in the United States Richard Haass is the president of the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations; despite having ...
Read more