After reading the editors’ of the Washington Post’s editorial advocating a revival of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), it’s still not clear to me what “a better China trade strategy”, their stated objective, would be. Here’s the gist of it:
In the closing weeks of the year, Japan announced a surge of defense spending, Taiwan extended its period of mandatory military service, and the Biden administration, which is keeping Trump-era tariffs in place on thousands of Chinese products, tightened export controls blocking Beijing’s access to strategic computer-chip technology.
Missing from this defensive formula is a positive strategy for competing with China on trade. China is consolidating its position at the center of Asia’s trading system. Its trade in Southeast Asia grew 71 percent in the past four years, according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis. Beijing is on a trajectory to dominate the economic landscape of the world’s most productive region, increasing its leverage over the United States and its allies.
concluding:
It isn’t enough to promote industrial policy and tighten export controls on computer chips and maintain tariffs on Chinese goods; the United States needs a positive economic strategy to engage with Asian states to expand export markets and counterbalance China’s pull. The time might not be right in this Congress, but Washington would be wise to turn its attention to Pacific trade while it can still do so on its terms.
It isn’t easy to summarize the joint and national interests of countries which in aggregate contain 30% of the world’s population succinctly but let’s give it a try. China is politically controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, irredentist, nationalist, and racist. China has border disputes with every neighboring country. That isn’t particularly extraordinary—so do we. The difference is that a number of China’s border disputes are “hot”, i.e. there’s fighting going on. We have border disputes with Canada and Mexico but if we’re actually fighting with either one of them it’s news to me.
China has been engaged in a program of occupying, annexing, and Siniticizing areas adjacent to it since 1950. Every single one of its neighbors is aware that there is no future for them in a close relationship with China (see above). Why are they cozying up to China?
Three reasons: they want China’s trade, they know that a close relationship is the price for that trade, and they don’t trust us. Why should they? If we had set out to deliberately engage in a program of causing people to mistrust us we could hardly do worse than what we’ve been doing over the period of the last 60 years.
What should we do? You’re going to get tired of my repeating this. U. S. power overseas is a consequence of our military strength and our military strength is downstream from the productive U. S. economy—our production of stuff. Not finance or services. Consequently, we need to do four things all at once:
- Ensure that we are, if not self-sufficient, at least near-shoring production of strategic goods.
- Bolster our productive economy
- Refurbish our military
- Take a less interventionist stance
and to accomplish those we’ll need to stifle two powerful domestic constituencies: free traders and international interventionists. Those are tall orders. As the Magic 8-Ball might tell us, don’t count on it.
