Kristen Hopewell's book asks a very simple but pressing question: how has global trade governance fared in the face of an increasingly palpable rivalry between the leading actor and superpower in global economic governance, the United States, and the rising challenger to its superpower status, China?
Evidently, not very well. However, as Hopewell's analysis carefully illustrates, the answer is far from straightforward and requires more nuanced thinking about which actor – the status quo power or the rising challenger – is in fact disrupting the existing order and to what end. This book makes a significant contribution both not only to the literature on global trade governance, but also to the literature on great power rivalry as well.
Through a careful examination of the two main actors’ interests, motivations, and negotiation strategies, underpinned by a wealth of semi-structured interviews with trade negotiators and government officials from China, the US, and Europe, the book demonstrates that the strength of the global trade order is a function of which great power can set the agenda and assemble a coalition of followers to hold the system together. This contention is not a new one, but to proponents of the argument that US power in the global economy experienced substantial decline vis-à-vis China over the past decade, this book offers a powerful arsenal of empirical evidence. Moreover, it has powerful explanatory potential for Washington's seemingly surprising turn to protectionism, which shook world trade in 2016 and continues to do so today, well after a transition to a new presidential administration in 2021.
The book's greatest strength is in Hopewell's ability to paint a coherent picture of how the strengthening and weakening of global trade rules track the rise and decline of US dominance in the global economy. Today's conflict over global trade, made palpable by the near abandonment of the World Trade Organization-centered global order by the erstwhile Trump administration in 2017 as it began to unilaterally impose tariffs on its largest trading partners, can be better understood if viewed from the inability of Washington to impose its preferred rules on Beijing, when the latter jointed the WTO in 2001.
Several aspects of the book will stand out for scholars interested in great power conflict and the political economy of international trade. In Chapter 2, the discussion on agricultural subsidies sheds light on the intensity of US pressure on China to temper its agricultural subsidy regime and brings together very revealing first-hand perspectives of trade negotiators that point to the rapid decline of US leadership in global trade. The rise of China, a developing country with very different interests from that of the US, Europe, and Japan, not to mention other developing countries, demonstrably threw a wrench in the balance of power that, before the mid-2000s tilted heavily toward the developed world.
The book displays an impressive command of the literature on global economic governance and the role of great power rivalry. It also offers a careful historical contextualization of China's rise as a global economic power vis-à-vis contemporary global economic governance structures and substantiates a point that has been frequently asserted but rarely demonstrated: that China's simultaneous status as both a great power and a developing economy makes its rise far more significant and distinct than that of Japan in the previous century. To its great credit, the book also avoids making more sweeping generalizations about China's likelihood to surpass the United States as a leading power in global economic governance. Rather, it sticks squarely to its main contention, that China's rise in global trade governance is demonstrable, its impact documentable, and the response from the incumbent hegemonic power not entirely surprising from the perspective of great power rivalry.
In Chapter 4, Hopewell aptly illustrates the diminution of US capacity to set global trade rules by documenting a US-led attempt to set broad limits on export credits, which fell significantly short of ambitions largely because of its inability to incorporate China and other emerging economies into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-led regime.
The book also makes an effort to avoid assigning blame for the erosion of global trade governance in the twenty first century on China's or other emerging economies’ frequently alleged flouting of the rules of the game. As Hopewell shows, it was precisely because China and other emerging economies learned how the existing rules worked, built coalitions to press their case, and litigated disputes in global fora that pushed the US to alter existing rules and to bring China and its coalition of emerging economies into compliance with the advanced economy-led OECD export credit regime. It is not only China's rise, but also status quo powers’ unwillingness to make concessions that have stifled cooperation in global trade.
To be sure, not every aspect of the book is entirely convincing. The book's starting premise, that China joined the global trade order from a position of weakness and had to make exceptional concessions to be allowed to join the organization that boasted the preponderant share of global GDP, is far from a novel one and remains relatively uncontroversial (albeit, to Hopewell's great credit, this point does need to be reinforced given today's highly fractious relationship between China and its advanced economy trading partners).
The more contentious claim, explored early on in Chapter 1, is that China's strength and US weakness is what led to the eventual collapse of Doha round negotiations. This argument is unlikely to persuade some readers, as it seems to dismiss the agency of the emerging economies of Brazil, India, as well as advanced European agricultural interests in the impasse that eventually emerged. While the United States may have been a driving force in rejecting emerging economies’ demands for a world trade rule recalibration, and its rivalry with China was perhaps an important stage on which Doha negotiations eventually came to a standstill, the lack of attention to Europe, India, and Brazil in the context of the Doha Round failure may puzzle scholars of international trade.
In various places throughout the text, the book also sacrifices context in engaging with interview material. For instance, while it is true that China's agricultural subsidies have been a key concern for several of its trading partners economies, much of this support does not translate into export revenues and is instead consumed locally, with China's agricultural imports proportionally high and rising.Footnote 1 Moreover, the lengthy discussion surrounding the size and opacity of China's subsidies seem to dance around a major issue that needed to be fleshed out in more detail: that far smaller, far more advanced economies like Germany, France, and the Netherlands are the world's top agricultural exports, joined most notably in the emerging economy category not by China but by Brazil.
And, of course, the United States has long been and remains the world's top agricultural exporter by a relatively wide margin at the time of writing. Therefore, the issue of China's commodity subsidies – not to mention that of other emerging economies – would have benefited from a more detailed discussion of advanced economies’ continued dominance in global agricultural trade and commodities supply chains. Merely stating that China and other emerging economies reserve special privileges to subsidize because they are developing countries only reenforces one of the points that the book seeks to dispute: that China is simply trying to game the rules to its own advantage.
Certain aspects of Hopewell's work also leave questions – perhaps beyond the scope of the book – that make fertile ground for future research. In the context of the book's otherwise excellent discussion of the contestation between China and the US on export subsidies, there is surprisingly little discussion of the US and the EU's reluctance to rescind its non-market economy status. The book's main argument may have been strengthened by a discussion of the debate on why existing WTO rules could not be used to address American and European concerns about China's multiple subsidy regimesFootnote 2 and why the US and Europe quickly turned to the OECD and antidumping duties to bring China in line. An issue that remains to be explored in future research on great power rivalry and world trade is why the US and the EU have chosen to liberally make use of antidumping duties and how this choice may or may not influence China's stance vis-à-vis the OECD's export credit regime.
Overall, Hopewell's effort makes an excellent addition to the bourgeoning literature on ‘revisionism’ in world politics and global governance. Clash of Powers adds substantial empirical weight to theoretical discussions about the nature of revisionism in world politicsFootnote 3 and that the analysis focuses on one of the most contentious aspects of China's alleged revisionism – its trade practices – greatly adds to the literature on this timely and important topic.
China's growing economic weight is certainly making the exercise of US hegemony more challenging. Does this challenge necessarily make the rising power, rather than the declining, status-quo power, the revisionist? That this waning capacity manifests itself in the erosion of global trade governance shows us the extent to which the US and its coalition of advanced economies set the rules of global trade in the postwar era. Whatever we think of these rules, Hopewell's book sheds great light on how they were set and enforced by Washington's global economic dominance.
