Erin Ennis is the Senior Vice President at the U.S.-China Business Council, and on May 20 she was a speaker at the GBD conference on
Pacific Arrangements. The others on her panel were all diplomats: one from Singapore, one from Japan, and one from New Zealand. She took note of the difference. "I'm trying to think of a way to characterize this panel," She began. "The only thing that comes to mind is the old Sesame Street adage, 'One of these things is not like the other.'"
China FTA Alternatives. Then she was off - off to a rich discussion of China's external commerce, both through trade agreements and through other means. We shall take our cue from today's quote and consider first what Ms. Ennis said about China's non-FTA initiatives. As she put it:
"China is seeking to have a role in the region in ways that don't require them to negotiate a free-trade agreement. In particular, I'm talking about China's initiative called One Belt, One Road and related to that the Asian Infrastructure and Development Bank. These initiatives are, on the one hand, ... very commercially focused. ... There are also some domestic political goals ... Massive new infrastructure projects throughout the Asian region not only would mean that [China is] meeting some commercial goals of enhancing trade in the region. ... [I]t would also mean ... a lot of demand for steel, concrete, aluminum - things that China makes a lot of right now."
China's FTAs. This is not to say that China doesn't have an aggressive FTA strategy. She does. Ms. Ennis pointed out that China currently has 13 such agreements, including those with Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore - all of which were participants in GBD's May 20 conference.
China's other current free-trade agreements are those with ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Pakistan, Chile, Peru, Hong Kong, Macau, Costa Rica, Iceland, the Republic of Korea, and Switzerland.
And there are others in the works. The last entry in this series talked about the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or RCEP, which is a Chinese led initiative, as well as the effort to craft a three-party FTA with China, Japan, and Korea. (Looking ahead, we are seeing more press reports these days about a possible FTA between Canada and China, but that is a topic for another day.)
China & TPP. Today, that is in the late spring of 2016, the idea of China as a TPP participant, and so in other words as an FTA partner of the United States, seems unimaginable. Ms. Ennis looked ahead to a larger reality. China, she explained, is no longer as concerned as it once was with TPP as a project for "containing" China, and Ms. Ennis gave the Obama Administration credit for countering that impression. Now, Ms. Ennis said, Chinese scholars and Chinese officials - especially scholars - are looking closely at the question, what would it take for China to join TPP?
Ms. Ennis's was clear that China should not join unless it can and will meet TPP's standards. "It is in no one's interest for China to join if it couldn't comply with [TPP's] very ambitious provisions," she said.
More memorable for us, however, was the effort Ms. Ennis made to tie together the detail oriented discussion about TPP and its standards with the larger realities of the evolving global economy. She said:
"[I]f we genuinely believe that TPP is a 21st Century agreement and [that] it is going to transform the way we all do business, and [that] it is going to write the rule for the rest of the economies, then, at some point we're going to need to have a conversation about how China joins the TPP. It doesn't make any sense to exclude the one largest economy - and probably, by the time this comes about, the largest economy in the world - from those negotiations and from being part of it."
