China’s chances of joining one of the world’s largest free trade areas could be hurt by its refusal to engage Australia on a ministerial level, Canberra’s top trade official said on Monday.

Australian trade minister Dan Tehan provided insights into the likely success of China’s plans to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) during an online interview for an industry event.

The trade bloc, which emerged in 2018 from the ashes of a previous trans-Pacific pact that fell apart following the US’ withdrawal, counts Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, Canada, Mexico and Peru among its members – and represents some US$13.5 trillion in combined gross domestic product.

Britain’s application to join the CPTPP, which it submitted in February last year, was last month advanced to the final stage of negotiations – spotlighting the later applications of mainland China and Taiwan, and whether they would be next up for consideration.

Tehan said on Monday that processing Beijing’s application, which like Taipei it submitted in September, would require existing CPTPP members to “sit down and talk and work through issues” – further noting that he had written to his Chinese counterpart upon becoming trade minister over a year ago but had yet to receive a response.

“We’re not even able to sit down and work through the current disputes that we have with China, without having to take them to the WTO when it comes to wine and when it comes to barley, so we would need to see those issues resolved,” Tehan said during the interview for The Economist Impact’s Asia Trade Week.

Calling for “a real commitment to following the letter and the spirit of the law, and also to be able to engage on … a ministerial level”, the Australian trade minister said: “What all countries want to see when it comes to accession to the CPTPP is that everyone who joins is committed to following the rules.”

New applications to the CPTPP are only approved if a consensus is reached among its existing 11 members, each of whose concerns, if any, need to be satisfied by the applicant.

When asked about China’s chances of getting into the CPTPP, Tehan pointed to how open negotiations had advanced Britain’s application.

Regular meetings he had with his UK counterparts last year for a bilateral free-trade agreement had helped satisfy Australia’s terms for the United Kingdom’s accession to the CPTPP, he said – particularly the “goods negotiations”.

Applicants must abide by the liberalisation of trade and engagement rules set out by the World Trade Organization to maintain a healthy multilateral trading system that benefits the global economy, Tehan said, adding that ministerial conversations were crucial to this process.

Australia and China have been embroiled in a diplomatic and trade dispute for much of the past two years, since Canberra pushed for an independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic without consulting Beijing.

Amid the dispute, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for the World Health Organization to be given the same powers as weapons inspectors; and Beijing has handed Canberra a list of grievances that included complaints of interference in China’s affairs and blocking Chinese foreign investment proposals “on opaque national security grounds”.

Their A$250 billion (US$185.3 billion) in bilateral trade has become the conflict’s primary weapon, with Beijing informally restricting imports of Australian coal and lobsters, and applying anti-dumping duties on wine and barley and other products from the country – rendering them noncompetitive in the Chinese market.

Both cases are being considered by a dispute settlement body at the WTO, which is also considering a complaint filed by China last year over Australia’s anti-dumping duties on Chinese goods ranging from train wheels to stainless steel sinks.

Between 1995 and 2020, Australia imposed 85 sets of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs against China. Beijing has so far imposed four duties against Australian products.

Julien Chaisse, a professor at City University of Hong Kong who specialises in international law, said Australia had few formal avenues to take China to task for informally blocking trade between the two.

“There is no WTO rule saying that importers cannot terminate a trade relationship – they have to be free to do so, otherwise there is no free market,” he said.

“All in all, let me say that informally blocking Australian trade is not against the letter of WTO agreements and, perhaps, only against the spirit which makes difficult formal complaints.”

Source: This Week in Asia

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