Promising Trail or Perilous Trap? Engaging China in the WTO and Beyond

Abstract

How to deal with China? This is the biggest question confronting U.S. trade policy—or even the United States’ entire foreign policy—today. Over the past few years, the debate on this important issue has benefited from the contributions of many trade law scholars, including those by Mark Wu, Jennifer Hillman, Petros Mavroidis, André Sapir, Rob Howse, Weihuan Zhou, and the present author. In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer offers refreshing insights. Building on the framework developed by the U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group, of which he is a member, Shaffer further adjusts the group's “four-buckets” model and provides an updated framework. Calling his approach “Rebalancing Within a Multilateral Framework,” Shaffer argues that his framework avoids the pitfalls of both “Power-Based Bargaining” and “Rule-Based Neoliberalism” and is the most promising “middle path.” As a trade lawyer, I am naturally more inclined toward Shaffer's approach and its firmer grounding in trade law, in contrast to the heavily econ-centric approach in the Joint Statement by the Working Group, which does not reference law. Coming from the other side of the Pacific, however, I would approach the issue a bit differently by asking the questions that rarely gets asked: What are China's reactions to these proposals? Will China be willing to trail along, or, perhaps more likely, will it view them suspiciously as “traps,” as China's former World Trade Organization (WTO) Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen once put it?