No to protectionism and arrogance

We publish here an excerpt from the speech at Chatham House of Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Senior Minister of Singapore

The United States and China should abandon the “hubris” of claiming superiority of their respective political systems and instead should focus on collaborating to advance their self-interests. There are no saints in the relationship between the superpowers. Both of them need to make adjustments. Both of them need to avoid a sense of hubris with regard to the superiority of their own systems. And both of them need to recognise that there’s actually a great deal in common in the way they go about trying to improve lives and grow incomes.Those are huge grounds for seeing eye to eye and developing rules to make sure that trade is fair, investment is fair and intellectual property is protected. These are rules that can be developed. The absence of a strategy of interdependence would not necessarily mean that China gradually withers away. It eventually rises anyway but when it finally gets there it will know who made it extremely difficult for it to get there. That makes for a dangerous world. There was a “step change” in the threat perception about China in the US in 2016. I don’t think that step change in the curve was occasioned by any new strategy on the part of China or any new development in China’s market share or China’s actions in any regard. It was domestic politics. Politics matters, and I think we are trundling down a road where we are in the politics of pessimism and grievance and it has to be redressed. China doesn’t yet feel it is ready to be an equal with the US at the centre stage but wanted to play a more major role in rule setting in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, in trade and other areas, On Taiwan, no serious observer, including those who are very close observers and who are engaged in this believes that China wants war with Taiwan. Neither does the US. And it’s extremely important to preserve prior understandings on Taiwan, and preserve the constructive ambiguity on Taiwan that has lasted for decades on the part of both the US and China. About global trade, if we go for a system that is protectionist, that imposes restrictions and where your actions domestically have negative spillovers on the rest of the world, you might be able to preserve relative superiority, at least for some period of time. But it is almost certainly at a cost of absolute performance everywhere.