It’s been one week since the United States unveiled its new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) agenda that is ostensibly intended to build and foster deeper U.S. economic engagement in Asia but is widely seen as Washington’s latest effort to confront China’s dominance in the region.
In all, 14-countries are now members of IPEF (Fiji just joined) who will all now spend the next 1-2 years negotiating the details of what will likely be a complex agreement (that incidentally will not include any preferential U.S. market access). In the meantime, Chinese scholars have been thinking about what IPEF means for Beijing and how the Chinese leadership should respond.
