What the US-China Trade War Means for Partners in Asia
Date: Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Time: 8-9 am (Eastern)
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About the event:
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, the trade war that he began has not only continued under President Biden but accelerated. The complexity of US export, import, investment, and sanctions regimes, each with distinct but overlapping rules, is not only hard for American companies to follow but increasingly relies upon cooperation and enforcement by other countries. Transshipment restrictions have become an onerous element of both US and Chinese measures. Particularly affected are East Asian countries that are usually regarded as US partners but rely on trade with both superpowers: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Christina Davis, a professor of Japanese politics at Harvard University and director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, and Pasha Hsieh, professor of law at Singapore Management University, will discuss the economic and political impact that US-Chinese rivalry is having on these countries, how much agency they have to comply or abstain from the superpower struggle, the impact on regional trade patterns, and whether these smaller countries may help lead the way back to a more unified rules-based trade order.
About the speakers:
Christina L. Davis is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics in the Department of Government and director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University. During the 2024-25 academic year she is on leave at Oxford University (affiliated to Queen's College) as the Centenary Visiting Professor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Her research interests include the politics and foreign policy of Japan, East Asia, and the study of international organizations, with a focus on trade policy. She is the author of Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton University Press, 2023), Food Fights Over Free Trade: How International Institutions Promote Agricultural Trade Liberalization (Princeton University Press 2003), and Why Adjudicate? Enforcing Trade Rules in the WTO (Princeton University Press 2012, winner of the international law best book award of the International Studies Association, Ohira Memorial Prize, and co-winner of Chadwick Alger Prize). Professor Davis holds an AB in East Asian studies and Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.
Pasha Hsieh is professor of law at Singapore Management University and holds the Jean Monnet Chair in EU-ASEAN Law and Relations. His teaching and research focus on international economic law, public international law, EU-ASEAN law, and Asian legal studies. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he is the author of New Asian Regionalism in International Economic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and co-editor of ASEAN Law in the New Regional Economic Order: Global Trends and Shifting Paradigms (Cambridge University Press 2019). Professor Hsieh holds an LL.B from National Chengchi University in Taiwan and LL.M and J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. in political science is from the Free University of Brussels. He began his career as an attorney in a New York law firm and has served as a legal affairs officer at the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat.