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US-China relations
China

China will be kept out of Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, US senator predicts

  • Beijing ‘will not meet the standards’ and behaves ‘in a predatory fashion’, according to Senator Bill Hagerty, who is involved in trade issues
  • A former top Chinese trade negotiator says the central role of state-owned companies should disqualify China as a CPTPP candidate

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US Senator Bill Hagerty speaks at a forum in Washington sponsored by the Council of the Americas. Photo: Mark Finkenstaedt
Robert Delaneyin Washington

Members of a Pacific Rim-focused trading bloc that China is trying to join will likely not allow Beijing in based on the country’s track record on market access, said a Republican US senator involved in trade issues.

Asked whether Beijing’s push to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) should prompt the US to restart entry negotiations, Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said that multilateral agreements were “hard to do” and that Beijing’s bid amounted only to “rhetoric”.

“I am not surprised that the CCP’s rhetoric is that they would like to enter the CPTPP,” Hagerty said on the sidelines of the annual Washington Council of the Americas, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “They will not meet the standards.”

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“I cannot imagine a set of circumstances that the other members that have already acceded to that treaty would accommodate a country that behaves … in a predatory fashion,” he added.

US President Joe Biden delivers remarks along with Japanese Minister Fumio Kishida and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India at the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity launch event in Tokyo in May 2022. Photo: Reuters
US President Joe Biden delivers remarks along with Japanese Minister Fumio Kishida and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India at the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity launch event in Tokyo in May 2022. Photo: Reuters

The comments by Hagerty – a member of Senate committees on appropriations, foreign relations and banking – put him on the side of lawmakers opposed to the CPTPP, a later version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which former president Donald Trump pulled out of soon after he took office in 2017.

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