way to improve US competitiveness and help workers and the environment.
Likely components of the administration's economic policy towards China
The first will likely be more complaints about Chinese subsidies and trade practices filed with the WTO, given the president’s campaign promises and his record during his first term. Washington has been relatively successful with such cases in the past, and pursuing multilateral dispute settlements has the added advantage of avoiding a direct bilateral confrontation with China.
The second will be the pursuit of trade agreements that notably do not include China. The most important of these is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement among a growing list of nations bordering the Pacific.
It is the Obama administration’s avowed aim to construct a TPP with standards so high — especially rules regarding labor rights, environmental protection and behavior by state-owned enterprises — that China could never join without transforming its economic system. This stance in part reflects the fact that two-thirds (67%) of the U.S. public believe China practices unfair trade, according to a 2012 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
The likely 2013 launch of a U.S.-European Union trade negotiation — effectively a Trans-Atlantic Partnership, a bookend for the TPP — primarily reflects majority (58%) sentiment in the United States that increased trade with Europe would be a good thing for the United States. But it can also be seen as an attempt to establish U.S.-European, rather than Chinese, technical and regulatory standards as global business norms.
http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/10/u-s-china-economic-relations-in-the-wake-of-the-u-s-election/
He seems to think that the countries in the WTO (practically everyone) has been unwilling or unable to incorporate enforceable human/labor rights and environmental standards into trade rules so that creating trade agreements that go beyond WTO rules is the way to go.
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