patrick.net

Having just traveled to New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, China, Taiwan and now Hong Kong, I can say without an ounce of exaggeration that more than a few Asia-Pacific business and political leaders have taken President Donald Trump’s measure and concluded that — far from being a savvy negotiator — he’s a sucker who’s shrinking U.S. influence in this region and helping make China great again.

These investors, trade experts and government officials are still stunned by an event that got next to no attention in the U.S. but was an earthquake out here — and a gift that will keep on giving America’s allies pain and China gain for years to come. That was Trump’s decision to tear up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal in his first week in office — clearly without having read it or understanding its vast geo-economic implications.

(Trump was so ignorant about the deal that when he was asked about it in a campaign debate in November 2015 he suggested that China was part of it, which it very much is not.)

Trump simply threw away the single most valuable tool America had for shaping the geo-economic future of the region our way and for pressuring China to open its markets. Trump is now trying to negotiate trade openings with China alone — as opposed to negotiating with China as the head of a 12-nation trading bloc based on U.S. values and interests and that controlled 40 percent of the global economy.
It is hard to think of anything more stupid. And China’s trade hard-liners are surely laughing in their sleeves.
Beijing is now quietly encouraging everyone in the neighborhood to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which lacks environmental or labor standards.

Carrie Lam, the new chief executive of Hong Kong, told me that countries like Australia are quickly reaching out to Hong Kong to forge closer and freer trade ties. It’s a “pity” that the Americans are leaving, she said, but “this will give our country this opportunity to lead.” China is not just looking for growth, she added, but also for “influence.”

Just to remind: Trans-Pacific Partnership was a free-trade agreement that the Obama team forged with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
It was not only the largest free-trade agreement in history, it was the best ever for U.S. workers, including restrictions on foreign state-owned enterprises that dumped subsidized products into our markets, intellectual property protections for rising U.S. technologies, anti-human-trafficking provisions that prohibited turning guest workers into slave labor, a ban on trafficking in endangered wildlife parts and the elimination of all child labor practices — all to level the playing field with American workers.

Yes, like any trade deal, it would have challenged some U.S. workers, but it would have created opportunities for many others because big economies like Japan and Vietnam were opening their markets. Some 80 percent of the goods from our 11 trade partners were coming into the U.S. duty-free already, while our goods and services were still being hit with 18,000 tariffs in their countries — which the trade deal eliminated.
That’s why the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that U.S. national income would have grown by some $130 billion a year by 2030 under the trade deal — not huge, just a nice boost for U.S. workers, businesses and diplomats.

Countries like Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore made big concessions to the U.S. to be part of the deal — precisely because they wanted America embedded in their own economies, as a hedge against Chinese economic domination.

The other people we disappointed, explained James McGregor, author of “One Billion Customers: Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China,” are China’s economic reformers: They were hoping that the emergence of the trade agreement “would force China to reform its trade practices more along American lines and to open its markets. … We failed the reformers in China.”

Out here everyone gets it: China has Trump’s number. Its officials were afraid of him at first — with his tough trade talk. But they quickly realized how easy it was to distract him with shiny objects, like promises to defuse the North Korea threat for him or by giving stale sector-specific trade concessions, such as for American beef exports to China — things China has promised multiple presidents before — that Trump could brag about.
Beijing watched Trump threaten to abandon America’s adherence to the one-China policy if he did not get trade concessions — and then just fold the minute China’s president, Xi Jinping, said he would not take a phone call from Trump unless he reaffirmed the “One-China” policy.

And China just invited Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on an official visit for early next year, red carpet and all. As my colleague Keith Bradsher reported, China, for the first time, has arrested Chinese labor-rights activists who were working undercover to investigate a Western supply chain — specifically, factories near Hong Kong that made shoes for Ivanka Trump and other brands. Moral of the story: Take care of the emperor’s daughter and everything will be fine.

You have to admire the Chinese combination of toughness, patience and savvy. One day I hope America again will have a president with such attributes — not a sucker for flattery, not an ignorant ideologue who rips up treaties he hasn’t even read, not a made-for-television negotiator who throws his best leverage out the window before he sits down at the table.

We may call him “Trump” in America, but here it’s pronounced “Chump.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/opinion/trump-china-asia-pacific-trade-tpp.html?_r=0