Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
By Hunter Wallace
The TPP is being sold as a geopolitical counterweight to China. Yeah right:
“Beijing already has free trade agreements with more than half of the TPP countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Singapore, Brunei and Vietnam, and it can exploit those arrangements to minimize or avoid import duties that would normally apply to made-in-China products.
Felipe Caro and Christopher Tang of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management explained in Fortune magazine this week how that could work.
“To satisfy certain country-of-origin conditions stipulated in TPP, China can manage the supply chain operations of cotton shirts by importing cotton from Pakistan (via its existing free trade agreement with China) and conduct ‘upstream’ operations, such as fabric design, knitting and dyeing at home.
“Then China can ship the fabric to Vietnam (via an existing free trade agreement with China). At the same time, Japan can ship the buttons to Vietnam (via the TPP). Vietnam can perform ‘downstream’ operations (sewing) and then ship the finished shirts via TPP agreement to Australia, Japan and the United States, cutting off the 5%, 10.9% and 16.5% import duties that would have applied if China had dealt directly with these countries….”