Proceeding by small steps can often be more effective than attempting a giant leap forward in getting where you wish to go. There is less chance of being forced into a retreat from an overambitious advance and, if you wish to carry others forward with you, there’s less danger of them getting left behind. This could prove to be the guiding principle for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership , which came into effect on January 1. The RCEP may appear rather pedestrian compared to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which attempted a winning sprint. But the TPP ended up tripping over badly. As the world’s top trading nation and second-largest economy (and because of the absence of the United States), China is the dominant partner within the RCEP. Yet, for all its alleged assertiveness, China is unlikely to use the RCEP as a battering ram – as the US was poised to do with the TPP. The debate may sound rather academic now, given that the US pulled out of the TPP (subsequently renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive TPP or CPTPP), leaving the 11-nation group led in effect by Japan. But Asia’s economic development is likely to follow a different course under the RCEP. For a start, countries in this region will be freer to move at their own pace and in directions they wish to go rather than having their development agendas largely dictated to them by outside powers whose own priorities do not necessarily accord with domestic priorities in Asia. Fifteen countries are involved: Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. But the US is absent , having pursued the TPP for preference. Trade agreements are first and foremost supposed to be about freeing up trade, and most economists agree that such accords do allow the principle of comparative advantage to operate most efficiently – in other words, countries can each do what they’re best at doing, and everyone gains. But trade agreements have been shaped in recent times more as economic weapons designed by economically advanced nations to extract advantages from developing nations that are vulnerable to exploitation. They have become potential instruments of a new form of economic colonialism. The TPP was a so-called “high level” accord promoted by the US under former president Barack Obama as a kind of Trojan Horse. It was designed to push member economies into a stage of economic development that some were not ready for and thus lay them open to predatory liberalisation. Manufacturing industries were only partially susceptible in this regard, having developed to a point where they could compete even without tariff protection on external trade. But it was a different matter when it came to often underdeveloped service sectors in Asia. In the case of the TPP as originally envisaged, countries like Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam were wide open to having parts of their service sectors taken over while the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore were in a position to do the taking over. Financial services, especially, is an area where more-advanced economies are potentially able to take advantage of their less-advanced brethren that have large populations of bank depositors, pensioners and insurance targets who are ripe for targeting when domestic services are not well developed. It is argued that developing countries gain from being exposed to modern financial services but this is disingenuous because methods of collecting and investing savings in advanced economies often leaves a great deal to be desired. In this sense, Asia could be better off developing its own systems. China beware, road to an open financial system is paved with Asian casualties For example, economic areas that need to be financed by large amounts of long-term savings – infrastructure, climate change mitigation and health spending to cite only three examples – tend to be underfinanced in advanced economies while short deployment of savings takes priority. Developing economies had stock markets virtually thrust upon them from outside instead of focusing more on bond market development that would have served their development needs better. Advanced nations have pressured less-developed economies to join them in agreements that were termed “economic partnerships” rather than trade accords. These were supposed to be partnerships of equals but advanced nations were able to run rings around less-advanced nations within them. Two sides of Asia: China’s economic priorities vs the US’ security focus All this argues in favour of a less interventionist model of economic partnership agreement and the RCEP arguably supplies it. It is of a less “high-level” nature than architects of the original TPP envisaged for the Asia-Pacific region, but that is maybe no bad thing. The irony is that just as the US was poised to capitalise on its economic agenda-setting mission via the TPP, former president Donald Trump pulled America out. The TPP may not be dead but, if it makes a comeback, it is likely to be with China and others as members and that will be a different animal. Anthony Rowley is a veteran journalist specialising in Asian economic and financial affairs