In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer argues that legal rules and dispute processes can play a major role in managing conflict and competition between the United States and China. While trade is the central focus of Shaffer's article, he realizes that it cannot be severed from other dimensions of the great power rivalry, including human rights and security issues. Shaffer rejects the idea promoted by some scholars (e.g., Petros Mavroidis and André Sapir) that the World Trade Organization (WTO) should double down on neoliberalism in response to the impact on trade of China's industrial policies by crafting rules that would constrain distinctive features of China's political economy. Such an approach fails to explain why China, a rising power with a strong sense of its own sovereignty and entitlement to its own political and economic system, would ever agree to these constraints. Shaffer and I agree on the basic vision of a pluralist WTO that respects deep differences among states and that is deferential to domestic policies to further legitimate objectives, whether protecting the environment or promoting the observance of basic labor rights around the world. Yet I differ with Shaffer on where the WTO fits into an overall strategy for addressing the global economic governance issues raised by the U.S.-China conflict. While I see the WTO as a useful and necessary part of the picture, I have a lesser estimate than Shaffer of its amenability and centrality to addressing many of the governance challenges that are at play. The post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade from which the WTO system originates still plays a crucial role in providing a structure for voluntary reduction in tariffs through negotiations based on reciprocity and a set of rules for the legal security of tariff concessions. This is reinforced by non-discrimination norms that apply to domestic policies that affect trade. But where non-discriminatory domestic policies are claimed to be trade restrictions, it is much less clear that they should be disciplined multilaterally through a trade-focused institution like the WTO that is not particularly sensitive to the demands of public policy in complex areas of regulation.

How to deal with China? This is the biggest question confronting U.S. trade policy—or even the United States’ entire foreign policy—today. Over the past few years, the debate on this important issue has benefited from the contributions of many trade law scholars, including those by Mark Wu, Jennifer Hillman, Petros Mavroidis, André Sapir, Rob Howse, Weihuan Zhou, and the present author. In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer offers refreshing insights. Building on the framework developed by the U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group, of which he is a member, Shaffer further adjusts the group's “four-buckets” model and provides an updated framework. Calling his approach “Rebalancing Within a Multilateral Framework,” Shaffer argues that his framework avoids the pitfalls of both “Power-Based Bargaining” and “Rule-Based Neoliberalism” and is the most promising “middle path.” As a trade lawyer, I am naturally more inclined toward Shaffer's approach and its firmer grounding in trade law, in contrast to the heavily econ-centric approach in the Joint Statement by the Working Group, which does not reference law. Coming from the other side of the Pacific, however, I would approach the issue a bit differently by asking the questions that rarely gets asked: What are China's reactions to these proposals? Will China be willing to trail along, or, perhaps more likely, will it view them suspiciously as “traps,” as China's former World Trade Organization (WTO) Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen once put it?

Gregory Shaffer's article discussing the legal aspects of the multifaceted U.S.-China relationship is comprehensive, pragmatic, and timely at the twentieth anniversary of China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. Shaffer provides a surgical analysis of the “three central dimensions of this relationship: (i) the economic dimension; (ii) the geopolitical/national security dimension; and (iii) the normative/social policy dimension.” He also offers a targeted roadmap to reconceptualize a world where policies are increasingly securitized and to revitalize domestic safety valves embedded in the post-war economic system. Under Shaffer's proposed “Rebalancing Within a Multilateral Framework,” states enjoy more policy space and accommodation, subject to the proportionality principle and protection of third parties. Supplementing Shaffer's analysis, I offer three alternative dimensions, namely, the perceptions of businesses, states, and international organizations and how they complicate the successful delivery of Shaffer's proposal. I echo Shaffer's call for empathy between the United States and China regarding their respective domestic challenges and approaches to each other. Yet I contend that adequate trust and understanding of each other and the agreement over Shaffer's identification of interfaces/dimensions by decisionmakers of the two nations are susceptible to disruptions caused by the three alternatives I offer. Furthermore, I argue that a thorough and inclusive policy and legal analysis—designed in a coordinated way (“统筹” in Chinese)—should reduce negative externalities from the management of the U.S.-China relationship and minimize impacts for developing and least developed countries.

Growing U.S.-China rivalry undoubtedly poses a profound threat to the multilateral trading system. In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer provides a highly nuanced and balanced analysis of the nature of this threat and potential solutions to address it. Yet managing trade conflict between the United States and China is, I argue, only one of the twin challenges currently facing the multilateral trading system. The other is how to rein in growing economic coercion and the arbitrary abuse of power by dominant states in the system. The United States and China have each become highly disruptive forces in the liberal trading order—not simply because of their bilateral trade relations but also, and just as importantly, because of their behavior toward the rest of the world. Both of these countries have increasingly turned away from trade multilateralism and toward aggressive unilateralism and the raw use of coercive power in their dealings with other states. It is this flagrant disregard for the rule of law on the part of the system's two dominant powers that has thrown the World Trade Organization (WTO) into crisis and ultimately poses the greatest threat to the global trade regime.