EVENTUAL INTEGRATION OF TPP AND OTHER REGIONAL TRADING PACTS

TPP, as a major regional trading arrangement, will inevitably have great impacts on the economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region. Despite allegation that TPP is intended to contain China's growing influence, China has adopted an open attitude toward TPP.

Yu Jianhua, China's deputy international trade representative, told a press conference in Bali in October that China maintains different economies should uphold the principle of openness, inclusiveness and transparency in negotiating free trade areas.

In the FTA negotiations, they should not exclude each other and each should not go his own way, but keep open to one another and be mutually promotive so that different FTAs would ultimately integrate, he said.

Chinese Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng told a press conference in March this year that China has adopted an open and inclusive attitude toward regional economic cooperation mechanism and held that all economies in the world have the right to choose the path to economic integration that best suit them.

"However, all FTA negotiations, including the TPP, should follow the principle of non-discrimination and transparency and serve as a useful supplement to multilateral trading rules rather than their replacement," he said.

According to the Asian Development Bank, there are currently more than 130 free trade pacts across Asia and another 100 in the works. Some experts have called attention to the proliferation of free-trade deals in the Asia-Pacific region and warned that this might hamper free trade itself.

For one thing, countries with smaller market make them less attractive as trade partners and are often left out of free trade agreements. For another, different and sometimes conflicting standards, rules can possibly stagnate economic growth, they argued.

Regional trading pacts led by major powers such as the TPP, should offer economies at different stages of development wider choices for liberalization and facilitation of regional trade and investment, rather than creating an overgrowth of competing trade mechanism where the law of jungle prevails, they noted.

In an earlier interview with Xinhua, APEC Secretariat Executive Director Allan Bollard said it is important for the different regional architecture of economic cooperation like TPP and RCEP to "potentially converge."

"If they diverge, that is a problem. We would not want to see part of the big economies in the Pacific in one direction and part of the other ones in another direction," he said.