China to 鈥榩lay own role鈥 in Asia-Pacific
Print Edition
CHINA will play its role in promoting economic integration in the Asia-Pacific, the foreign ministry said yesterday, after US President-elect Donald Trump said he would kill an ambitious regional trade pact.
The Republican termed the Trans Pacific Partnership “a potential disaster” for the United States.
China, Japan and South Korea are already in the initial stages of discussing a trilateral trade deal, and for the past five years China has been pushing an Asian regional trade pact that excludes the US.
Asked whether China would be a beneficiary of the US withdrawal from TPP, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China had an open attitude toward any arrangement that promoted regional free trade.
“The APEC meetings in Peru discussed free trade arrangements in the Asia-Pacific region and decided to continue advancing the Asia-Pacific free trade zone process. This is a very positive signal,” he said.
China is willing, with other parties, to promote the economic integration process in the Asia-Pacific for the benefit of the people of the region, “Geng told a daily news briefing.
“I think that in this process, China will play its own role and make its own contribution,” Geng added, without elaborating.
After Trump’s announcement, Japan and Australia, Washington’s closest allies in Asia, pledged to push ahead without the United States, although removing the largest market for goods and services would shrink it dramatically.
China has pushed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which notably excludes the US. It is a more traditional trade agreement, involving cutting tariffs rather than opening up economies and setting labor and environmental standards as TPP would.
China has tended to see the TPP as part of US efforts to exclude it from setting global rules and to rally others against Beijing.
Geng said all parties in the Asia-Pacific should have a say in regional matters, rather than just one country setting the agenda, and repeated that the issue of free trade should not be politicized.
“That is to say, we hope that all sides do not consider or interpret free trade arrangements from the perspective of geopolitics,” he added.
“There is no zero-sum relationship between the various free trade arrangements, and they should not be mutually exclusionary, but rather should promote each other.”
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