In Asia, Washington Takes Its Revenge on China

The partnership signed by the United States and 11 countries of the Asia-Pacific zone is much more than a trade agreement. For Washington, it is also, and above all, a means of limiting the Chinese influence in the region.

Over the next few weeks, the Democratic or subsequently Republican opponents of Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House are going to feast on her sudden turnaround on the subject of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. On Wednesday evening, only days after the signing of the agreement by 12 nations of the Asia-Pacific region, the former U.S. secretary of state affirmed that she could no longer support the very ambitious economic pact that she herself had encouraged and above all theorized on at the beginning of the 2010s. From the moment it became involved in the negotiations initiated by Chile, New Zealand, Brunei and Singapore, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s United States saw much more than a simple trade agreement in the TPP. The pact, later joined by Canada, Mexico, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia and finally Japan, would become a central element of America’s strategy for geopolitical repositioning in an Asia where its influence, long uncontested, was suddenly facing competition from China.

Dropping the mask of “Pacific emergence” behind which China had promised to organize its rise to power, Beijing felt ready to more strongly affirm its ascendance over the region. The financial crisis of 2008 had finally demonstrated the limits of the Western liberal model and demonstrated the pertinence of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” defended by the Communist regime. The Chinese growth was not crumbling, and the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations were able to count on this lifesaver offered by their greatest economic partner.

Taking on a new legitimacy, China has quickly shown itself to be more ambitious, and even aggressive, within the region. In May 2009, the Communist power published a map of the South China Sea, on which a dotted line denoted its control of 80 percent of the maritime zone. In the following trimesters, Beijing has not hesitated to hassle the Philippines and Vietnam, which dared contest these claims on cays situated very near their coasts.

Confronted with this new arrogance and the distress of its Asian allies, notably the Filipinos and Japanese, the United States, which after 1990 had enjoyed a “unipolar” hegemony, proposed the gradual redeployment of troops to the zone beginning in 2011. By 2020, 60 percent of the country’s naval and aerial forces would be installed in the India-Pacific region, Washington promised. But with the outbreak of new crises in Europe and the Middle East, this redeployment has hardly materialized. For Washington, the TPP has therefore become the only concrete proof of its re-positioning in the region. “Passing TPP is as important to me as another aircraft carrier,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter last April.

Before the impetus of the Obama administration, the negotiations of the partnership did not focus solely on a reduction of customs duties imposed on the tens of thousands of products exchanged among the 12 partners, but above all, pushed the participating capitals to sign on to a very liberal development model inspired by American values. The 30 chapters of the agreement thus define new environmental protection regulations and ask that states bring their labor laws up to standard, notably by establishing a minimum wage. The treaty will reinforce the protection of intellectual property in emerging countries and constrain Malaysia to confront its heavily subsidized state-owned enterprises, which compete with the private sector. The public markets will also be more open. “If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region,” Barack Obama summarized in the spring, convinced that the authoritarian Chinese power would complain for a long time before rallying to the economic and social model defined by the TPP.

A good sport, Beijing did nothing other than salute the conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Everything that reinforces integration within the zone is good and the TPP is a good thing; that was the essence of the declaration by the minister of commerce, hoping that it would favor growth but also the negotiations of other free trade agreements. What are the implications of this? There is no question of abandoning the discussions on the implementation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which has been put forward by Beijing to create a free trade zone with no Western parties. It has not been prevented. China has long been hostile toward the TPP and certainly continues to be, toward what it perceives as Washington’s weapon for limiting its influence in the region.

If the United States is convinced of having made a point, the power balance between the two alpha males of the Pacific will not change drastically. For Douglas Lippoldt, an HSBC economist, China cannot be presented as the loser because of this treaty, and the consequences of its being implemented — if it is ever ratified by the U.S. Congress — will probably be minimal. Besides, the Chinese president knows that the sprout of American influence cannot be a substitute for the force of commercial exchange woven over the years by Beijing, even if the recent slowdown of the Asian giant slightly erodes its power to attract. None of the countries participating in the TPP will ever be able to snub the great Asian neighbor.