The Trans-Pacific Partnership, China and India: Economic and Political Implications by Amitendu Palit (review)

Amitendu Palit’s book is a very useful resource that benefits from its timeliness and focus on a specific comparative research topic, China’s and India’s interests in and present positions towards the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations.

The author has done a good job of incorporating the most recent sources, with the latest published in late 2013 and a majority of sources used written in the last two years. Hence, the book is still relevant for a broad range of mostly non-academic readers with a primary interest in the present situation of the TPP, China’s and India’s potential membership in the TPP, or the interaction between the TPP and the smaller, less advanced ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations that include China and India. Palit’s succinctness and clarity of writing enhances the book’s broad appeal and utility.

The book’s focus makes a relevant contribution to a wide range of research areas of current academic, governmental and media interest in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. From the specific to general, these include: Chinese foreign and trade policy in East Asia; Indian foreign and trade policy in East Asia; Chinese views of the United States’ position in East Asia; the political economy of trade in the Asia-Pacific; and the implications of the shift to a more multipolar inter-state system where large “emerging market” states such as India and China are increasingly influential. The book’s comparative focus on China and India is particularly relevant for its contribution to the latter area, and to the very small but recently expanding literature on relations and comparisons between the two most populous states and re-emergent powers in the world.

More specifically, Palit’s book has two particular strengths and two limitations, all stemming from the book’s ambitious scope and admirable brevity. First, the book provides a compelling case about the different levels of current Chinese and Indian economic and strategic engagement with Asia-Pacific states and preparedness to join the TPP. China is much further ahead on both accounts and the book is more about China than India. Likewise, the final chapter focusses on Chinese and Indian strategies to join the TPP. This chapter outlines concrete specific steps for China while for India it is more an exhortation for New Delhi to develop a coherent trade diplomacy strategy and the political will to overcome protectionist interests.

Second, The Trans-Pacific Partnership, China and India does a good job of summarizing the different origins, goals and potential roadblocks and pitfalls of the ongoing TPP and RCEP processes and how these two complicate and invigorate the progress of each other. Palit looks at how the inclusion of the United States in and present exclusion of China and India from TPP negotiations, and the inclusion of China and India in and present exclusion of the United States from RCEP negotiations complicates the interaction between the two and undermines their ability to be merged later into the envisioned wider Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific. As developed in the book, these major power membership differences contribute to concerns that the TPP and RCEP already may be or will become arenas for the strategic competition between the United States and China.

Palit’s focus on Chinese assumptions about the geo-political implications of the American leadership of the TPP process, particularly prevalent as noted during the later Hu Jintao years, contributes to two of the book’s limitations. Palit’s analysis of the TPP and its implications for China and India does not provide enough information about or give enough weight to the political economic dynamics shaping American trade diplomacy and approach to the TPP. On the domestic front, the difficulty for any administration to get a trade deal through Congress and the demands that this process puts on what is required in any trade deal the American executive...