中文导读
特普朗上台后第三天就宣布退出TPP，自此TPP就陷入了群龙无首的状态。但是，最近，除美国外的其余11国想要重新恢复TPP，以建立新的区域贸易秩序。此外，RCEP正在亚洲建立自由贸易秩序。两者能否合并不得而知，但是RCEP建立如TPP一样的“黄金准则”尚任重道远。虽然有望“春风吹又生”，但是TPP的重组还有很多具体的事宜有待处理。
Who needs 12 members to make a team? A big trade deal may go ahead without America.
WHEN, three days after his inauguration, Donald Trump pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-country free-trade deal that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wanted to be his legacy in Asia, it was the fulfilment of a campaign promise. “Great thing for the American worker, what we just did,” he said, as he
signed away
new markets for American carmakers, farmers and drugs companies, along with the prospect of over 100,000 new American jobs.
Among the other 11 members, the shock was not just over the new president’s hostility to America’s historical role as promoter of an open, rules-based trading order, of which the Asia-Pacific region has been the greatest beneficiary. Without the United States, which accounted for three-fifths of the bloc’s combined GDP, TPP was, in the words of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, “meaningless”. After all the sweat and political capital expended in crafting the agreement, which was signed in late 2015 but which only Japan has ratified, TPP was, nearly everyone agreed, now fit only to be buried.
Revival meeting
What a difference three months make. This week in Toronto, the surviving members—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam—met to discuss how to move the partnership forward without America. At the end of May, they will meet again for a more
substantive
gathering in Hanoi. There, bet on TPP confounding the undertakers and rising from the dead.
That may seem strange. After all, although Mr Trump convinced himself that TPP was
lousy
for America, it was the other members who had to make most of the “concessions” in terms of opening markets. They did so because the American market is a huge prize. (Their own tariffs are bad for consumers, too, but this never seems to matter politically.) Some, including Japan, also saw TPP as a mark of America’s strategic commitment to the region in the face of a rising China. So they promised to lower barriers, open their service industries to investment and competition, strengthen patent protection and tighten environmental standards. It really was, as its boosters said, a “gold-standard” deal.
Yet Deborah Elms of the Asian Trade Centre, a trade-advisory group in Singapore, says the remaining 11 members’ gains from TPP would still be large even without America (as are the
forgone
gains for America in several sectors including food and services). The gains apply even to the poorest member, Vietnam, whose
garment
and footwear industries, underpinned by cheap labour, would benefit from access to the markets of the other rich members. For instance, Ms Elms points out, Australia has a 9.5% tariff on swimwear. Assuming every beach-lover owns three or four costumes, Australia alone represents a big potential market for Vietnamese bikinis and budgie-smugglers. Some aspects of implementing an agreement without America might even prove easier. One example: communist Vietnam was forced to agree to a “side letter” with America insisting on higher labour standards, including allowing
verifiably
independent trade unions. After America’s withdrawal, this uncomfortable obligation falls away.
Yet most countries have been shy about being seen to take the lead in reviving the TPP—with all respect to tiny New Zealand, always an
unabashed
champion of open trade. For several members, including Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, a chief concern is for a revived club not to be seen as an
affront
to China. For Japan, in contrast, that is precisely the point—though it will never admit it in public. Its bigger concern, given its reliance on American security, is not to be seen as anti-Trump.
Here, Mr Abe’s tour of the golf courses at Mar-a-Lago with the American president in February paid dividends. Their joint statement afterwards referred to Japan “continuing to advance regional progress on the basis of existing initiatives”. In other words, Mr Trump gave his blessing for Japan to try to keep TPP going. The Hanoi gathering is a Japanese initiative. Most other members, once reassured that a revived TPP will be structured as neither anti-China nor anti-Trump, seem ready to follow.
Another set of multilateral negotiations is under way to liberalise trade in Asia: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP. Some mistakenly call it a China-led initiative, and are suspicious of it as a consequence. In fact, as Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean ambassador-at-large, underlines, it is led by the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and is intended to meld existing free-trade agreements that ASEAN has with six other countries. One of the countries is indeed China. But four others—Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand—are American allies, while the sixth, India, as Mr Kausikan puts it, is “hardly a Chinese
stooge
