Trail or Trap? How to Deal with China in the WTO and Beyond

“How to deal with China?” This is the biggest question confronting US trade policy, or we can even say its entire foreign policy, today. Over the past few years, the debate on this important issue has benefited from the contributions from many trade law scholars, with those by Wu, Hillman, Mavroidis, Howse, Zhou and Gao as leading examples. In “Governing the Interface of US-China Trade Relations”, Gregory Shaffer offers his insights. Building on the framework developed by the US-China Trade Policy Working Group, of which he is also a member, Shaffer further adjusts the “four-buckets” model and provides an updated framework. Calling this “Rebalancing Within a Multilateral Framework”, Shaffer thinks that this avoids the pitfalls of both the “Power-Based Bargaining” and “Rule-Based Neoliberalism” approaches and is the most promising “middle path”. As a trade lawyer, I am naturally more inclined towards Shaffer’s approach as it has a firmer grounding in trade law, in contrast to the heavily econ-centric (and law-less) approach in the Joint Statement “US - China Trade Relations — A Way Forward” issued by the US-China Trade Policy Working Group two years ago. Coming from the other side of the Pacific, however, I would approach things a bit differently by asking the question that rarely gets asked: What are China’s reactions to all these proposals? Will China be willing to trail down one of them, or will it regard them as “traps” which are better avoided, as China’s former WTO Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen once put it?