The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership and its Implications for China's Role in East Asia Regional Integration

Abstract

International relations have undergone major transformations since the end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and retreat of communism, the rise of liberalism pushed the world towards temporary peace while facilitating the spread of global capitalism. The col-lapse of the iron curtain and developments in technology ushered in the age of globalization, in which states become highly interdependent, and ideological confrontation and military competi-tion have yielded their place to the market and economic cooperation. However, the stagnation of negotiations towards liberalization since the WTO Doha round provided a wakeup call for many states. States no longer simply embrace the ideal of multilateral trade liberalization and begin to adopt a more pragmatic approach towards global trade. Under the conception of “gaining the en-try ticket first before upgrading the seat,” states have turned their attention to the formation of regional trading networks, hoping to increase bilateralism before pushing for multilateral and trans-regional linkages. The development of regionalization in East Asia has lagged far behind the European Un-ion (EU) and the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). Regionalization in East Asia only began to take off after the Asian financial crisis, with the political and historical contradictions in the region affecting the delay in regional cooperation. Even though China, Japan and Korea have subsequently proposed schemes for regional cooperation since the early 1990s, territorial dis-putes and historical conflicts have hindered the realization of regional projects. Currently, re-gionalization in East Asia is centered on ASEAN. Over the years, ASEAN has expanded from the original ten countries in Southeast Asia to overlapping regional architectures that have differ-ent strategic implications such as ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan, Korea), ASEAN + 6 (China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand) and ASEAN + 8 (U.S., Russia, China, Japan, Korea, In-dia, Australia, New Zealand). Realization of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) in 2010 heralded a new era in the development of regional integration in East Asia. The effect of CAFTA was to push Japan and Korea to hasten their footsteps in negotiating for free trade with ASEAN while symbolizing