BIT Neg - umkcsdi.umkcdebate.comumkcsdi.umkcdebate.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/…  · Web viewIt determined that the word “involving” cast doubt on China’s ... the BIT

BIT Neg

Inherency/Solvency

Solvency – Chinese Circumvention

China won’t abide by the agreementEve Cary, 7/18/13, The Diplomat, “the promise and peril of a US-China investment treaty,” http://thediplomat.com/2013/07/the-promise-and-peril-of-a-us-china-investment-treaty/, mm

On the Chinese side, there is a persuasive argument that the Chinese cannot be counted on to carry out economic agreements. This is usually backed by the allegation that China has not fulfilled its obligations to the WTO after it became a member in 2001. China also has an enduring central-local problem, illustrated by the aphorism “the mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.”

Simply put, even if the central government agrees to policies opening the door for U.S. investment, opportunities and policies at the local level may not match up — U.S. companies could still face significant challenges in localities.

China will circumvent the BITJacobsen 2015 – Lin Jacobsen received her LLM in international investment law cum laude from the University of Amsterdam in August 2014 and joined Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in October 2014 as a litigator in its Asia dispute resolution practice. Previously, she worked as a corporate attorney in investment law at the New York office of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP upon receiving her JD from Columbia Law School as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar in 2007 (“INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS: ZOOMING IN ON CHINA'S BIT PRACTICE,” 26 Am. Rev. Int'l Arb. 19)As indicated by its traditionally conservative stance vis-à-vis ISDS, China prefers to stay outside of international arbitration in its BIT practice. Empirical evidence shows that it has been very successful at doing that. So far, there are only five known arbitration cases based on BITs to which China is a party, all of which occurred in the last half decade. More remarkably, in only one of the cases was China the respondent state and in all the others a Chinese investor invoked the BIT to claim against a foreign state. n84 In addition, the only case where China was the defendant was not the product of the liberalized ISDS mechanism of a new-

generation BIT, but arose under an old-generation BIT. n85 It seems that the liberalization of ISDS provisions in China's new-generation BITs has not opened the floodgates of arbitration against China. If any trend is to be observed, it is the Chinese investors that are increasingly testing the waters of international arbitration against foreign states. It is also interesting that of the five BITs [*31] involved, four of them are South-South BITs (i.e. between China and a developing country). Where the only South-North BIT was invoked, Belgium found itself in the hot seat being sued by Ping An, a Chinese insurance company, for losses associated with its investment in Fortis, a Belgian financial services group that was nationalized by the Belgian government in 2008. n86 Thus none of the cases features an aggrieved investor from an industrialized capital-exporting country resorting to the newly available comprehensive arbitration to protect its property rights in China, the scenario most likely envisaged by those that applaud the liberalization of ISDS in China's new-generation BITs. The next question would be: why has it not happened? The reasons could be manifold. The old-generation BITs limit arbitration to disputes regarding the amount of compensation for expropriation and many of them are still in force. n87 However, Tza Yap Shum v. Peru shows tribunals may not interpret such limitation as restrictively as the language suggests. n88 In that case, Peru objected that the tribunal had no jurisdiction to determine whether the Peruvian tax authority's actions constituted expropriation because the China-Peru BIT only allows for arbitration "involving the amount of compensation for expropriation," which is consistent with China's notification under Article 25(4) of the ICSID Convention. n89 Tza, the Chinese investor, claimed that this provision meant the tribunal may decide on "other important matters related to the alleged expropriation." n90 The tribunal sided with Mr. Tza. Without engaging in an analysis of the case's full implication for ISDS under China's old-generation BITs, one can at least say that, with the help of expansive interpretation by a tribunal, investors may have more leeway with ISDS under China's old-generation BITs than the language suggests. n91 China's new-generation BITs do not even have such limitation language. Why have investors covered by those BITs not made use of their ISDS? There could be practical reasons, such as investors choosing not to pursue their claims for fear of burning bridges with China. n92 As far as legal reasons are concerned, a study done in 2008 on the status of the rule of law in Suzhou Industrial Park ("SIP") is very informative. n93 SIP was the economic development zone with the second highest [*32] amount of FDI on China's east coast in 2007. n94 The study surveyed 100 foreign companies investing in SIP, of which 61 responded. Among the respondents, 13 were from Hong Kong and Taiwan, 15 from the European Union, six from the United States, 22 from other areas of Asia (including one jointly invested by Japan and Taiwan and one jointly invested by Taiwan and Singapore), two jointly invested by Japan and the U.S., and three from the British Virgin Islands. n95 Compared to the results of a similar study done in 2001, the 2008 survey showed that foreign investors had growing confidence in China's legal system regarding FDI, underlining the remarkable improvement that China has made to its rule of law in the last decade. n96 Many answers provided to the SIP

study help inform this article's discussion. First, foreign investors in China value the rule of law and investigate the applicable legal framework before investing. Of all respondents, 88% considered the rule of law very important. n97 More than 54% of them investigated both Chinese law and applicable international treaties and 63% of such investors were aware of the BITs between their countries and China. n98 Thus, the scarcity of arbitration against China does not seem to have much to do with investors' ignorance with respect to China's BIT program. Secondly, foreign investors overall do not have an apocalyptic view of China's legal system. Fifty-five percent of the respondents considered the system mostly or always accessible; only 10% said that FDI-related laws and policies were subject to unexpected changes frequently or most of the time, 46% said that it happened sometimes and 41% reported that they rarely encountered unexpected changes. n99 Although not yet a "fully effective system," China's legal system seems to have gone

through significant improvement in terms of predictability and reliability. n100 It is possible that the existence of BITs and the

availability of arbitration thereunder have pressured China into enhancing the rule of law to

avoid arbitration. n101 Be that as it may, the end result seems to be that foreign investors in China do not feel much need for international

arbitration. As proof, only nine out of the 61 respondents reported having had disputes with the Chinese government n102 and when asked how they would prefer to resolve disputes, five chose negotiation, four chose to go to local court and none chose arbitration. n103 [*33] A few words should also

be said about the domestic administrative review procedure. The ISDS provisions in many new-generation BITs offer arbitration on the condition that the investor first submit the dispute to China's administrative review procedure. n104 China's old-generation BITs limit arbitration to disputes relating to the amount of compensation for expropriation, but they generally do not impose a similar condition. n105 They may impose a cooling-off period of a few months during which investors should try to resolve the dispute through consultation. n106 Such a requirement, unlike administrative review, would not subject the investor to an additional set of procedural and possibly substantive rules under China's administrative law, whereas the entity conducting the review procedure may be subject to

"internal pressure" to protect national interests and fail to conduct the proceedings impartially. n107 Therefore, as far as disputes relating to the amount of compensation for expropriation are concerned, China's new-generation BITs may arguably impose more stringent requirements than the old-generation BITs. In addition, the

requirement to exhaust the administrative review procedure may serve as China's protective

barrier against arbitration. Even if an investor has submitted its claim to such a procedure, China may claim that the investor has failed to exhaust the administrative review and object to an arbitral tribunal's jurisdiction over, and/or the admissibility of, the investor's claim. This concern is particularly relevant where the BIT does not cap the duration of the procedure. n108

Since China is the lawmaker behind the whole procedure, the tribunal may be obliged to give deference to its interpretation, which would make it more likely for China's objection to prevail.

Previous BITs prove China will ignore the agreementJacobsen 2015 – Lin Jacobsen received her LLM in international investment law cum laude from the University of Amsterdam in August 2014 and joined Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in October 2014 as a litigator in its Asia dispute resolution practice. Previously, she worked as a corporate attorney in investment law at the New York office of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP upon receiving her JD from Columbia Law School as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar in 2007 (“INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS: ZOOMING IN ON CHINA'S BIT PRACTICE,” 26 Am. Rev. Int'l Arb. 19)To sum up, China's BIT practice is a process driven by interest. China's BIT-making cannot be impervious to its historical context, be it the BIT practice of other countries or the backlash against international arbitration. The current debate on backlash may even have shaped the discourse of Western and Chinese scholars alike relating to China's BIT program. However, the evolution of China's BIT program is first and foremost linked to the transformation of China from a traditional developing country and recipient of FDI to

a formidable force in both inbound and outbound FDI. Accordingly, the development of China's BIT program is best understood by reference to China's pursuit of its evolving interest. China has been quite adept at this balancing

act. For example, while Chinese investors overseas will benefit from comprehensive arbitration under China's new-generation BITs, the condition imposed on foreign investors of exhausting China's domestic administrative review procedure helps protect China from having to litigate frivolous claims in an international setting. Similarly, the requirement that capital transfer be subject to Chinese laws (or the formalities thereof) will enable China to maintain its grip on currency exchange and capital flow, but will not hamper the freedom of Chinese investors

wiring money back to China. The recently signed China-Canada BIT suggests that prudential carve-outs determined by

contracting states in concert may become an effective mechanism in China's interest-driven BIT-making. As its economic power and experience in

international investment law grow in tandem, China will likely carve a path of its own in BIT-making with more and more distinct Chinese characteristics. But whatever shape it takes, that path will be guided by China's everlasting pursuit of its interest.

China will circumvent the agreementIrwin 2014 – conducts research on Chinese investment in Latin America for GDAE. He received his M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He taught courses on Political Economy in China and Mandarin Chinese at the Tufts University Osher Center. (Amos, “Crossing the Ocean By Feeling For the BITs: Investor-State Arbitration in China’s Bilateral Investment Treaties,” https://international-arbitration-attorney.com/wp-content/uploads/China%E2%80%99s-Bilateral-Investment-Treaties-Working-Paper1.pdf)Finally, the Chinese government argued against its own citizen to prevent an international tribunal from hearing an expropriation case under a restricted BIT. In 2007 a Hong Kong investor named Tza Yap Shum attempted to bring expropriation charges

against Peru at ICSID, the first time an investor has ever filed an international arbitration case under a Chinese BIT. He did this in spite of the fact that the 1994 China-Peru BIT specifically restricts disputes to those “involving the amount of compensation for expropriation.”53 To assist Peru in its defense and thereby ensure that the tribunal did not find jurisdiction over the case, China sent one of the original negotiators of the BIT, a team of international law scholars, and thousands of pages of court documents.54 Fan Jianghong, the Chinese negotiator, testified that China had intended this clause to prevent international arbitrators from deciding whether or not a state had expropriated a given investor’s assets.55 However, the tribunal found for Tza Yap Shum, against both China and Peru. It determined that the word “involving” cast doubt on China’s intentions according to the Vienna Convention’s guidelines on interpreting treaties. It argued that any investor who sued the state for expropriation in local courts would be shut off from subsequent international arbitration by the “fork-in-the-road clause.” Since the BIT’s preamble pledges to “encourage investment,” the tribunal argued that the BIT must allow some form of dispute resolution, and thus it must allow entire expropriation cases. It rejected the Chinese argument that China had clarified its intentions through a clear “official policy,” though almost every old BIT contained a similar provision and many international scholars believe in such a policy.56 The decision drew upon precedent from a similar wording-based decision in European Media Ventures

v. Czech Republic. 57 Chinese scholars were outraged by the tribunal’s decision. Chen wrote that the decision came

to the “great surprise of Chinese scholars.” These scholars, including Chen, wrote a flurry of articles protesting it.58 The Chinese government voiced its own protest by writing a new clause into its latest BITs that will block similar cases in the future. China’s negotiators inserted a brand-new clause at the end of the China-

Colombia BIT that would have ensured that Tza Yap Shum could not access international arbitration. The clause requires investors who claim that the government expropriated their assets using taxes to first argue their case with the host government’s tax department, then allow their home government to decide if the taxation was actually tantamount to expropriation.59 Since Tza Yap Shum had claimed that the Peruvian government unjustly froze his assets for tax violations, this clause would have given the Chinese government a chance to throw out

his case. It is reasonable to assume that China essentially wrote this provision, not Colombia, because China allows its partners little influence over the terms of its BITs. As the Chinese and Peruvian negotiators testified during Tza Yap Shum v Peru, “the negotiations between Peru and China were substantially based on the Chinese draft of the BIT.”60 Thus China responded specifically to Tza Yap Shum by blocking his strategy in its later BITs.

China Says No – No US Pressure

China will say no – the US doesn’t have enough leverage – sufficient investment now means China has no incentive to change its positionBob Davis, 6/12/13, The Wall Street Journal, “US-China investment treaty: less than meets the eye,” http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/07/12/u-s-china-investment-treaty-less-than-meets-the-eye/, mm

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew claimed that the big prize from the recently concluded U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue talks was restarting negotiations with China over an investment treaty. He called the treaty talks a “significant breakthrough” because it would cover “all stages of investment and sectors”—meaning financial services and other areas that the U.S. industry has complained are closed to U.S. firms.¶ One of his predecessors as Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, said such a deal, called a Bilateral Investment Treaty “would help level the playing field and assure access by eliminating discriminatory policies and practices.”¶ But don’t count on a BIT changing anything in U.S.-China relations any time soon.¶ To start with,

the U.S. firms have been able to invest many billions of dollars in China without the help of such a treaty and China’s investment in the U.S. is ramping up as well –again, sans treaty.¶ And while it’s easy to start negotiations, it can be excruciating to put together anything meaningful and have it signed. (Witness the Doha global trade deal that’s been limping along for more than a decade with no signs that it will eventually be concluded.) And then, even if a deal is inked, it has to be passed by Congress, which is increasingly hostile to foreign trade deals.¶ “It’s a noble goal but one which will be very difficult to conclude in any reasonable time period and it might well fail,” says China scholar Nicholas Lardy at the Peterson Institute for International Trade in Washington DC. Another Washington think tanker who focuses on China, Derek Scissors of the Heritage Foundation, headlined his emailed comments: “An Investment Treaty with China: Don’t Hold Your Breath.”¶ Why the skepticism? Mr. Scissors explains that BIT’s generally are used to protect investors from discriminatory policies. “They are not transformative instruments which change the nature of economies, especially not large economies,” he says.¶ According to the U.S. Trade Representative’s website, the U.S. has currently has about 41 BIT’s in force, with such minor trade partners as Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Morocco and Rwanda, where U.S. businesses might genuinely worry about expropriation. There is no BIT with the European Union, Mexico or Canada, according to the website – some of the U.S. largest trading partners.¶ Views on the treaty are divergent among Chinese experts as well. Li Yushi, a researcher linked to China’s ministry of commerce, was upbeat about the agreement, saying the talks will likely open fresh areas for investment. But another researcher with ties to the ministry, Mei Xinyu, was lukewarm on the prospects for any rapid progress. “There is no way that we could finish the talks this year, or anytime soon as it’s complicated and many topics are involved,” said Mr. Mei.¶ Discussions with China over a BIT aren’t new. They began in 2008 and foundered until they were cut off. The S&ED would simply restart talks – and add to the very long list of trade deals the U.S. is negotiating including free-trade pacts called the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.¶ The U.S.-China Business Council, a trade association of big firms doing business in China, hopes a BIT will help it address some areas of discrimination in high-tech projects. Piper Stover, a U.S-China Business Council official, warns that without a BIT, “China will also have a harder time investing in the U.S.”¶ Perhaps. But while a few high-profile Chinese acquisitions have been stopped by Congressional opposition, so far Chinese firms have had had fairly clear sailing in the U.S. even without an investment treaty. Pressure on China to make concessions for a deal

may not be great .

China Says No – Negative List

China won’t agree on the negatives listShannon Tiezzi, 3/24/2016, The Diplomat, “are china and the US case to sealing an investment treaty?” http://thediplomat.com/2016/03/are-china-and-the-us-close-to-sealing-an-investment-treaty/, mm

China and the United States are almost finished with negotiations over a key investment treaty, former Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming said on Wednesday. If successfully concluded, the bilateral investment treaty (BIT)

could substantially increase Chinese and U.S. investments in each other’s markets .¶ A BIT between China and the United States has been in the works for eight years. In 2013, the two sides announced that they were finally ready to enter “substantive BIT negotiations” after nine rounds of talks on technical issues. Now, according to Chen, the two sides are almost finished.¶ Xinhua cited the former commerce minister, who was speaking at the Boao Forum for Asia, as saying that most of the key issues in BIT negotiations have been resolved. Chen mentioned that both sides have agreed, for example, to handle disputes between the host country and investors via third-party arbitration at the World Bank.¶ Chen’s announcement came as something of a surprise, because the BIT has largely faded from the spotlight when it comes to the U.S.-China relationship. Overshadowed by the South China Sea and cyber issues, the BIT didn’t even make it into the White House’s main fact sheet on outcomes of President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States in September.¶ A separate fact sheet specifically on economic relations saw Presidents Obama and Xi “reaffirm as a top economic priority the negotiation of a high standard BIT.” But there were no targets set for completing the agreement, only a promise to “intensify the negotiations and to work expeditiously to conclude the negotiation of a mutually beneficial treaty.” That was a disappointment to optimists who had theorized the treaty could be finalized in time for Xi’s big visit.¶ According to the U.S.-China Business Council, U.S. foreign direct investment in China has remained fairly steady, at between $2.7 and $4.1 billion per year, since 2008. Chinese investment in the United States, however, has skyrocketed in the same period – going from less than $1 billion in 2008 to $11.9 billion in 2014 (down from a high of $14 billion in 2013). As these numbers indicate, the objectives of both sides are different. U.S. firms hope that a successful BIT could open up what has become a stagnant investment environment in China. Chinese firms – which are in the midst of drastically expanding their investments in America — seek a streamlined investment process that would eliminate fears of bias and excess scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS).¶ Currently, United States (and other foreign firms) are blocked from investing in a laundry list of industries in China, from genetically-modified agricultural products and domestic parcel delivery services to news outlets, publishing houses, and television stations. Other sectors are “restricted” and may require foreign investment to come as part of a Chinese majority-owned joint venture. Even the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, which is supposed to be an experimental zone with fewer restrictions than the country at large, comes with a lengthy “negative list” of off-limits industries, including

automobile manufacturing, telecommunications, and banks.¶ And to many business leaders, it seems China is getting less – not more

– receptive to foreign investment; witness, for example, a new rule that bans any company with foreign investment from publishing

content online. According to the U.S.-China Business Council’s 2015 China Business Environment Survey, China has made little progress on the issue over the past few years, despite repeated commitments to opening its markets. Even in sectors where foreign investment is allowed, USCBC also found that 80 percent of American companies believe their Chinese competitors receive preferential treatment — and that’s just for private enterprises. When it comes to China’s state-owned firms, 97 percent of respondents said SOEs are

receiving a competitive boost from the government.¶ USCBC, however, has been a vocal advocate for the conclusion of a BIT, arguing (in an open letter to Obama and Xi from 94 U.S. CEOs), that “a high-standard BIT – with clear provisions providing

equal treatment to each country’s investors and a short list of exceptions – is one of the key items that could make an immediate and tangible impact for both of our economies.” The question, of course, is how high the standards will be, given China’s neuralgia regarding foreign investment and its stated goal of promoting Chinese domestic firms as international superstars — which to

date has involved shielding them from domestic competition.¶ China’s current commerce minister, Gao Hucheng, previously said that China and the United States have “basically completed text negotiation” on the BIT , a

claim echoed by Chen this week. However, Gao was speaking in March of last year – and he noted at the time that agreeing on the actual negative lists — the areas that will remained closed to foreign investment — would be a “challenge.”

Whether the U.S. and China have made any progress since exchanging their latest negatives lists in September remains to be seen.

2NC Overview (Kansas Lay Debate)

The BIT should be halted – too many unanswered questionsMichael Wessel, 3/10/15, The hill, “growing US-china investment? not a BIT,” http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/235081-growing-us-china-investment-not-a-bit, mm

While fast track trade negotiating authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement are capturing headlines, another trade initiative is advancing: The U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). China is expected to take a key step in accelerating those negotiations shortly by supplying a list of industries it wants to exclude from coverage. The BIT may have as great a long-term impact on U.S. trade posture and our country’s economy as the TPP. The BIT should be halted.¶ Chinese

investment in the United States now outpaces U.S. investment in China. On the surface, this might seem like good news. But, it’s far too early to know. Without more information and true transparency a BIT could have devastating consequences. China shouldn’t be rewarded with a BIT while it continues to so blatantly flaunt the rules of international trade.¶ Chinese firms are on the march to acquire and invest in U.S. assets, all-too-often with their government’s financial support. The limited policy responses by China’s trading partners have given them the resources to engage in this shopping and investing spree. Indeed, the United States’ failure to address China’s currency manipulation has helped stock that country currency stores which are being used to scoop up U.S. assets and expand China’s reach and influence.¶ Sure, in theory, Chinese investment in the U.S. might restore some of the jobs that America still needs. But fists-full of renminbi are being invested without any real understanding of the nature of these investments and their long-term impact on the U.S. economy, domestic production and employment.¶ The administration’s answer is a BIT. Indeed, at the most recent Strategic & Economic Dialogue, the U.S. and China agreed to quickly reach a deal. Before we accelerate this trend, we need to understand why China is buying up America and its implications.¶ A treaty to spur bilateral investment that follows the pattern of China buying up America’s existing companies and U.S. companies moving more production facilities and jobs abroad is not in the interests of American workers. Easing the way for greater investments in China will only help fuel America’s unacceptably high trade deficit with China. In fact, more than 55 percent of China’s exports already come from foreign-invested enterprises; more investments will only yield more imports into the U.S. and increase our historically high trade deficit with China.¶ The so-called “promise” of greater access to China and its 1.3 billion consumers hasn’t panned out. Another agreement with China, when it refuses to abide by many of the commitments it’s already made, is akin to hoping that Lucy won’t again yank the football away from a naïve Charlie Brown. Just look at China’s enforcement of its anti-monopoly and other laws against U.S. and foreign companies and you’ll see that China is far from willing to level the playing field¶ Here are a few more things to consider:¶ No comprehensive independent business

case studies exist evaluating the methods and operations of Chinese firms operating here. Do they operate based on Western profit-making principles, or are they simply advancing the goals

of the People’s Republic’s 12th Five Year Plan and China’s leadership goals?¶ Every major investment by a Chinese entity here has to undergo at least one, and often several, Chinese governmental reviews. Some of those rules have been updated on paper but the actual implementation is far from certain. Why do those investments need approval, unless it’s to ensure they advance the interests of the Chinese Communist Party?¶ How can a U.S. firm compete against subsidies from the Chinese government, which has at its disposal $3.5 trillion in foreign currency reserves? Chinese state-owned entities, and many others, receive preferential financing and other benefits. We shouldn’t have to compete against the Chinese government. ¶ What are the long-term implications to capitalism if the profit-motive is diminished or eliminated from the equation? A new Chinese facility created here that isn’t as concerned with profits as existing U.S. firms could squeeze them, and all of their suppliers, out of the market. Importing non-market economy principles to the U.S. will have serious implications.¶ The jury is still out on whether Chinese investments in the U.S., overall, are a good or a bad thing. There is no real information to support moving forward with a BIT. And, the picture isn’t reassuring. We shouldn’t rush

to conclude another agreement that will tie America’s hands, while providing enormous new advantages to a competitor

who has failed to show a similar respect for the agreements it signs. ¶ Negotiations on a Bilateral Investment Treaty with China

should simply be halted until we have the data and experience necessary to make an informed decision. American workers can’t afford to have their government make another mistake in U.S.-China trade policy.

AT Interdependence Advantage

AT Solvency – BIT =/= Interdependence

BIT can’t solve independence – other things trigger trade breakdownDonnan 2016 – World Trade Editor for The Financial Times (Shawn, “US and China skirmish as trade clash looms,” http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4bd8c6ec-16c5-11e6-b8d5-4c1fcdbe169f.html#axzz4BuMCf5aw)Donald Trump may be threatening to start a trade war with China, but it is becoming clear that the US and its geopolitical rival are already skirmishing ahead of what could be a combative summer. The latest sign came on Tuesday when the US brought a new challenge in the World Trade Organisation against Chinese anti-dumping tariffs on US poultry products. It was the 12th time that the Obama administration has taken China to the WTO, more than any previous US administration. “American farmers deserve a fair shot to compete and win in the global economy and this administration will continue to hold China responsible when they attempt to disadvantage our farmers, businesses and workers,” said Mike Froman, US trade representative. The latest move is part of a broader effort by the administration and American industry to get tough on China that is seeing the trade rhetoric being dialled up even far away from the campaign trail. “This is war. This is not trade. China is waging economic war. We ought to recognise that and act accordingly,” Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of iron ore producer Cliffs Natural Resources, told reporters last week on the sidelines of a US steel industry association meeting. Driving the administration’s push is its

desire to secure congressional approval before President Barack Obama leaves office in January for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the

largest trade deal negotiated by the US in decades. Those plans have been complicated by the antitrade rhetoric of Mr Trump and others campaigning to succeed Mr Obama. The administration’s response has been to turn up the volume on its own argument that the TPP — which besides the US includes Japan and 10

other Pacific Rim economies but not China — is an important strategic response to Beijing’s own bid to control the region’s commerce. If China is the problem, as Mr Trump and others argue, then the TPP, rather than the crude tariffs the presumptive Republican nominee is proposing, is the correct response, administration officials argue. Those efforts are also coinciding with growing anxiety in the US business community about what they see as a new economic nationalism in China and its impact on everything from agricultural

exports to technology businesses and the global steel industry. By the end of this month the US commerce department is set to decide whether to allow a case brought by US Steel seeking a comprehensive ban on imports of steel from China as punishment for what it says were Chinese hacking attacks and the theft of its intellectual property. Later this year three separate anti-dumping cases could see punitive tariffs of as much as 266 per cent imposed on certain Chinese steel products. The US is also applying pressure on China elsewhere in the trade sphere. It has been quietly leading a campaign to block China securing “market economy” status under the WTO, something Beijing prizes and argues it should be granted automatically come December and the

15th anniversary of its accession to the global trade body. Even as it pushes to make progress on a bilateral investment treaty with China the Obama administration is keeping Beijing out of separate talks in Geneva on the global trade in services. Washington is pressing it to loosen restrictions on green products such as solar cells in yet another set of negotiations. Chad Bown, a former member of Mr Obama’s council of economic advisers, said there was a fundamental difference between the administration’s tactics against China and what Mr Trump is proposing. The current moves are all being conducted within “the rules of the game” while Mr Trump’s proposed unilateral tariffs would likely put the US in violation of WTO rules. But other advocates of free trade bemoan what they see developing. Dan Ikenson, who directs trade research at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the administration’s pushing of the TPP as a geopolitical response to the rise of China highlighted just how weak Mr Obama’s position now was with Congress. “The elements are all there for the administration to cast China as this real international scofflaw and this danger. And the best way to hit back is to bring these trade cases,” he

said. There is also a risk that an “extremely hostile period” in US-China trade relations could have consequences for the future of the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, said Gary Hufbauer, a US trade policy expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “I see years of acrimony ahead on this current path.”

AT Interdependence – Alt Causes/Unsustainable

US/Chinese interdependence is unsustainable – alt causes collapse it regardless of the planStephen Roach, 10/7/15, East Asia Forum, “The sion-american co-dependency trap,” http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2015/10/07/the-sino-american-co-dependency-trap/, mm

Increasingly reliant on each other for sustainable economic growth, the United States and China have fallen into a

classic co-dependency trap, bristling at changes in the rules of engagement. The symptoms of this insidious pathology were on clear display during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to America. Little was accomplished, and the path ahead remains treacherous.¶ Co-dependency between the two was born in the late 1970s, when America was gripped by wrenching stagflation and the Chinese economy was in shambles following the Cultural Revolution. Both needed new recipes for revival and growth. They turned to each other in a marriage of convenience. China provided cheap goods, and America provided the external demand that underpinned Deng Xiaoping’s export-led growth strategy.¶ Over the years, this morphed into a deeper relationship. Lacking in saving and wanting to grow, America relied increasingly on China’s vast reservoir of surplus saving to make ends meet. Anchoring its currency to the dollar, the Chinese built up a huge stake in US Treasury bonds, helping America fund record budget deficits.¶ But economic co-dependency is as unstable as human co-dependency. One partner eventually changes, while the other is

left hanging, feeling scorned.¶ China is now changing, and America doesn’t like it. Not only is China shifting its economic model from exports to consumption, it is also redefining its national character. It has adopted a more muscular foreign policy in the South China Sea, embraced the nationalistic longing of rejuvenation, framed by what Xi calls the ‘China Dream’. And it has started to reshape the international financial architecture with new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank and the Silk Road Fund.¶ The US response — so-called ‘strategic rebalancing’ — has put China on edge, with its subtext of containment. The United States recognises the need to increase China’s role in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; but when it fails to deliver, it chafes at Chinese institution building. While Washington has long

urged China to tilt its growth model toward private consumption, it is uncomfortable with many of the implications of this shift.¶ In large part, America’s unease reflects a failure to address its core economic problems — mainly a lack of domestic saving. The net national saving rate stood at just

2.9 per cent of national income in mid-2015, less than half the 6.3 per cent average during 1970–2000. As China shifts from surplus saving to saving absorption — using its surpluses to build a safety net for Chinese citizens rather than subsidise

American savings — America will find it tough to fill the void.¶ America’s monetary policy reveals another layer of co-dependency. By citing international concerns — especially China’s slowing growth — as a major

reason for deferring its long-awaited interest-rate hike in September, the Federal Reserve has highlighted the key role that China plays in sustaining a still-fragile US recovery.¶ And with good reason: US exports — which accounted for a record 13.7 per cent of GDP in the fourth quarter of 2013, up from 10.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 — slipped back to 12.7 per cent of GDP in mid-2015. With domestic demand still weak (real consumption has grown at an anaemic 1.4 per cent since 2008) the United States needs export growth more than ever. So the outlook for China, America’s third-largest and fastest growing export market, is crucial for a Fed that has failed to gain much traction from unconventional post-crisis monetary policies.¶ This aspect of co-dependency is global in scope. Since 2005, China has accounted for an average of 1.6 percentage points of world GDP growth per year — more than double the combined 0.7-percentage-point contribution of the so-called advanced economies. Even if its GDP growth slows to 6.8 per cent this year, China would account for slightly more growth than is likely from the advanced world. Little wonder its growth prospects are such a big deal for policymakers worldwide.¶ Speaking in Seattle on 22 September, Xi stressed the need for both America and China to deepen their ‘mutual understanding of strategic intentions’ as a key objective for the bilateral relationship. And yet his deliberations with US President Barack Obama lacked precisely that. The agenda was shaped more by disconnected issues — cyber security, climate change and market access — than an appreciation of the strategic challenges that both countries

face alone and together.¶ There was little sign of meaningful progress even on the issues that were discussed. Both sides hailed a newfound commitment to high-level exchanges on cyber crime; but Washington is about to impose sanctions on Chinese companies that have benefited from egregious hacking. Likewise, they stressed yet again the need for a ‘high standard’ bilateral investment treaty; but there was little indication of serious movement on shielded industries (the ‘negative list’).¶ To its credit, China did announce an important shift in environmental policy — a nationwide cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions, to go into effect in 2017. But, without similar actions by the United States, China’s move hardly tempers the perils of global climate change.¶ Trapped in a web of co-dependency, the Sino–American relationship has become fraught with friction and finger pointing. In human behaviour, the endgame of

this pathology is usually a painful breakup. The just-concluded summit did little to dispel this possibility.

AT Interdependence Solves War

Multiple other factors overwhelm interdependenceRosen and Hanemann 2011 – Daniel H. Rosen is Founder and China Practice leader of the Rhodium Group (RHG), a specialized firm advising the public and private sector. Mr. Rosen is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, where he has taught a graduate seminar on the Chinese economy at the School of International and Public Affairs since 2001. He is a Fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, where he has been affiliated since 1993. Thilo Hanemann is Research Director at the Rhodium Group. (“An American Open Door? Maximizing the Benefits of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment,” Center on U.S.-China Relations Asia Society and Kissinger Institute on China and the United States Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, http://asiasociety.org/files/pdf/AnAmericanOpenDoor_FINAL.pdf)The problem with this complex interdependence school of international relations is that nations sometimes come into conflict despite their mutual economic interest in not doing so.

Information is not evenly shared, disruptive new trends and technologies destabilize assumptions about mutual interests, the benefits of the status quo are not evenly distributed, grandiose political aspirations override material betterment, or leaders simply make irrational choices.67 Reality places the burden on governments to identify and mitigate the national security risks potentially arising from FDI.

Economic interdependence doesn’t solve—Chinese belligerence causes miscalc and crisis escalation Medcalf & Heinrichs 11 - Rory Medcalf is Director of the International Security Programme at the Lowy Institute, Sydney. Raoul Heinrichs is Sir Arthur Tange Scholar at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, and editor of the Lowy Institute Strategic Snapshot series, June 27, 2011, “Asia’s Maritime Confidence Crisis,” online: http://the-diplomat.com/2011/06/27/asia%E2%80%99s-maritime-confidence-crisis/?print=yesTo the casual observer, recent security tensions in Asian waters might seem a storm in a Chinese teacup. The spectacle of opposing vessels – often motley flotillas of civilian patrol boats, fishing trawlers and survey ships – jostling near contested reefs, rocks and islets in

the South and East China seas is the kind of activity that was likened back in Cold War days to a game of ‘nautical chicken’. Surely, in an age of economic interdependence and nuclear weapons, this petty posturing wouldn’t lead to great-power war? Yet

such wishful thinking ignores the real dangers of Asia’s China-centric maritime incidents. In the absence

of effective mechanisms for crisis-management and confidence-building, these events are increasing in frequency and intensity. The harassment by Chinese civilian vessels of the USNS Impeccable in 2009 presaged a serious set of encounters in 2010, including North Korea’s sinking of the Cheonan and a diplomatic crisis between China and Japan over the ramming of a Japanese customs vessel near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Though major power tensions have eased somewhat in 2011, encounters have continued. Chinese helicopters have continued to ‘buzz’ Japanese naval units, even in the sensitive period following Japan’s earthquake and tsunami. In March, a Philippine survey ship was shadowed and harassed by Chinese patrol boats, eliciting formal diplomatic protests from Manila. More recently, in May and June, Chinese patrol boats have allegedly severed seismic cables aboard Vietnamese vessels operating near disputed territories in the South China Sea. Washington has weighed in, particularly with signals of reassurance to its ally Manila – prompting Chinese warnings about fanning flames and getting burned. At the weekend, Sino-US and Sino-

Vietnamese talks seem to have put a lid on the simmering tensions. And the chance that such incidents will lead to major military clashes shouldn’t be overstated. But each encounter involves risks, however small, of miscalculation and casualties. As the number and tempo of incidents increases, so does the likelihood that an episode will escalate to armed confrontation, diplomatic crisis or possibly even conflict. An accumulation of incidents could also play into a wider deterioration

of relations among major powers, with dangerous implications for regional peace and stability.

AT Trade Solves War

Trade doesn’t prevent war---their studies have been disproven by subsequent empirical work Charles Miller 14, lecturer at Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 4/7/14, “Globalisation and war,” http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/globalisation-and-war/John O’Neal and Bruce Russett’s work is perhaps the best known in this regard—and Steven Pinker cites them approvingly

in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Analysing trade and conflict data from the nineteenth to the twenty-first

centuries, they found that trade flows do have a significant impact in reducing the chances of conflict, even

when taking a variety of other factors into account. But their conclusions have in turn been questioned by other scholars . For one thing, their model failed to take three things into account. First, it’s quite possible that peace causes trade rather than the other way around —no company wants to start an export business to another country if it anticipates that business linkages will be cut off by war further down the line.

Second, conflict behaviour exhibits what’s called ‘network effects’— if France and Germany are at peace, chances are Belgium and Germany will be too. And third, both the likelihood of conflict and the level of trade are influenced by the number of years a pair of countries has already been at peace—because prolonged periods of peace increase mutual trust. Take any of these factors into account, and studies have shown (here and here) that the apparent relationship between trade flows and peace disappears . ¶ Perhaps, though, conceiving of globalisation solely in terms of trade flows is mistaken. Alternative indicators of globalisation include foreign direct investment, financial openness and the levels of government intervention in economic relations with the rest of the world. Data on those variables is less extensive than on trade flows, usually dating back only to the post World War II period. But some analysts, such as Patrick McDonald and Erik Gartzke, have argued that a significant correlation can be found between them and a reduction in the probability of conflict. Those findings, newer than O’Neal and Russett’s, haven’t yet been subjected to the same intense scrutiny, so may in turn be qualified by future research. ¶ What does

all that mean for the policy-maker? The statistical evidence certainly doesn’t tell us that globalisation has made war in East Asia impossible. ‘Cromwell’s law’ counsels us that a logically conceivable event should never be assigned a probability of zero. The most we could conclude is that globalisation has made such an occurrence much less likely. There’s some hopeful numerical evidence that globalisation does indeed have that effect, but the evidence isn’t so compelling that we can substitute an economic engagement policy for a security policy. By all means, let’s continue to promote trade in the Asia-Pacific. But we should also continue to be prepared for scenarios which are unlikely but would be hugely.

AT Economy – Impact Defense

Even massive economic decline has zero chance of war Robert Jervis 11, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425

Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy, and bring back old-

fashioned beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that

were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if

the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited, it is hard to

see how without building on a pre-existing high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an

optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-

turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about

greater economic conflict, it will not make war thinkable

Economic decline doesn’t cause warMacDonald and Parent 11 MacDonald, Asst Prof. of PoliSci @ Williams College and Parent, Asst Prof. PoliSci @ U of Miami, 2011 Paul and Joseph, “Graceful Decline?”, International Security, 35.4, Project MUSEIn this article, we question the logic and evidence of the retrenchment pessimists. To date there has been neither a comprehensive study of great power retrenchment nor a study that lays out the case for retrenchment as a practical or probable policy. This article fills these gaps by systematically examining the relationship between acute relative decline and the responses of great powers. We examine eighteen cases of acute relative decline since 1870 and advance three main arguments. First, we challenge the retrenchment pessimists' claim that domestic or international constraints inhibit the ability of declining great powers to retrench. In fact, when states fall in the hierarchy of great powers, peaceful retrenchment is the most common response, even over short time spans. Based on the empirical record, we find that great

powers retrenched in no less than eleven and no more than fifteen of the eighteen cases, a range of 61-83 percent. When international conditions demand it, states renounce risky ties, increase reliance on allies or adversaries, draw down their military obligations, and impose adjustments on domestic populations. Second, we find that the magnitude of relative decline helps explain the extent of great power retrenchment. Following the dictates of neorealist theory, great powers retrench for the same reason they expand: the rigors of great power politics compel them to do so.12 Retrenchment is by no means easy, but [End Page 9] necessity is the mother of invention, and declining great powers face powerful incentives to contract their interests in a prompt and proportionate manner.

Knowing only a state's rate of relative economic decline explains its corresponding degree of retrenchment in as much as 61 percent of the cases we examined. Third, we argue that the rate of decline helps explain what forms great power retrenchment will take. How fast great powers fall contributes to whether these retrenching states will internally reform, seek new allies or rely more heavily on old ones, and make diplomatic overtures to enemies. Further, our analysis suggests that great powers facing acute decline are less likely to initiate or escalate militarized interstate disputes. Faced with

diminishing resources, great powers moderate their foreign policy ambitions and offer concessions in areas of lesser strategic value. Contrary to the pessimistic conclusions of critics, retrenchment neither requires aggression nor invites predation. Great powers are able to rebalance their commitments through compromise, rather than conflict. In these ways, states respond to penury the same way they do to plenty: they seek to adopt policies that maximize security given available means. Far from being a hazardous policy, retrenchment can be successful. States that retrench often regain their position in the hierarchy of great powers. Of the fifteen great powers that adopted retrenchment in response to acute relative decline, 40 percent managed to recover their ordinal rank. In contrast, none of the declining powers that failed to retrench recovered their relative position.

AT Economy – BIT Fails

A BIT would wreck economic growth – outsources jobs, Chinese investors can undercut domestic prices, and allows China to challenge US trade laws Dayen 4/18DAVID DAYEN. MARCH 18, 2016. The Job-Killing Trade Deal You’ve Never Heard Of: The China Bilateral Investment Treaty. David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon.com who also writes for The Intercept, The New Republic, and The Fiscal Times. http://prospect.org/article/job-killing-trade-deal-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-china-bilateral-investment-treatyThe 2016 election has highlighted growing public opposition in both parties to the status-quo globalization agenda, which both sides blame for outsourcing jobs and privileging corporate profits over ordinary workers. This populist voter backlash puts trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on life support, and is forcing candidates to better explain how they would boost jobs and wages. But what if those voters learned that the Obama administration is in the midst of negotiating yet another corporate-friendly trade deal, one that would facilitate more offshoring, and that could also give China, of all countries, effective veto power over domestic policy? That’s precisely what’s happening in behind-the-scenes negotiations over a little-publicized agreement on the table between the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies. Just as the White House is trying to sell TPP as a bulwark against China, the administration is simultaneously seeking an investment treaty with the Chinese that undercuts that argument. “It really calls into question the contention of the Obama administration that they have a coherent strategy to integrate trade and international relations and national security,” says Barry Lynn, a senior fellow at New America. “It shows they have no idea what they’re doing.” The deal is called the China Bilateral

Investment Treaty, or BIT. This is a standalone compact which would normally be negotiated as the investment chapter in a broader free trade agreement. Investment treaties provide a framework for foreign investors to pursue direct corporate ownership stakes in a partner country, offering them a series of guarantees of non-discriminatory treatment, limits on the expropriation of capital, and access to extra-judicial tribunals to enforce the agreement. The latter are set up through a system known as the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, which has expanded in scope in recent years as a key protection for foreign investors. In fact, ISDS has proven hugely controversial in the TPP debate, with critics charging it would allow corporations to overturn national laws that constrain their profits. The U.S. has implemented 41 BITs over the years, as well

as investment chapters in a dozen free-trade agreements. But the U.S. already attracts more foreign direct investment than any country in the world, with $168 billion flowing in just in 2012. That includes investments from countries that until now have lacked the protections of a BIT, like China. “It’s pitched as a way to promote investment,” said Celeste Drake, trade and globalization policy specialist at the AFL-CIO. “We’re one of the top countries for foreign investment anyway. We don’t need to give away rights for foreign investors.” Few investors have the capital to undertake and manage businesses overseas. Invariably, large multinational corporations, or investment vehicles like hedge funds and private equity firms, engage in foreign direct investment. And a BIT offers them the ability to lock in profits while neutralizing the risks that go along with investing abroad. For example, U.S. companies operating in China encounter local corruption, preferential treatment for their domestic producers, intellectual property theft, and ever-changing regulatory demands. The BIT sweeps away such hurdles, and allows foreign investors to use ISDS to

recoup lost profits if foreign governments use those maneuvers to hamper their business. It effectively removes American companies’ one big motivation for keeping manufacturing stateside—our relatively stable judicial and regulatory systems and rule of law. If companies can get all that guaranteed in China, there’s nothing keeping their factories here. The BIT, then, is a recipe for more outsourcing. China currently protects many of its industries by excluding foreign investment in certain sectors. The key to the BIT is what’s known in trade deal parlance as the “negative list”—a list of which sectors would stay excluded. U.S. corporations want to whittle down that list and pry open more sectors where they can invest in China, and subsequently move production overseas. On the flip side, there’s already substantial Chinese investment in the U.S.—more than U.S. investment in China, in fact—but we don’t have good information on its impact. Many Chinese companies are state-owned or state-influenced, subsidized from home, and freed from having to run an immediate profit. Michael Wessel, a commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, warns that Chinese-subsidized firms could squeeze domestic competitors by undercutting them on price. Despite this uncertainty, Wessel contends that not single case study on Chinese-invested firms has been undertaken by an independent expert. “We have no idea what Chinese companies are doing in the U.S.,” he says. “Not all investment has [the] same impact. Our negotiators are flying blind.” When you contemplate Chinese state-owned enterprises enjoying the same treatment on their investments as domestic producers, and having the ability to use ISDS to

maintain those privileges, things get even more alarming. “ISDS puts corporations and sovereign governments on the same plane,” says the AFL-CIO's Drake. “This would be China acting through a corporation to challenge a U.S. law.” Under ISDS, Chinese companies could sue federal, state, or local governments over any laws that force them to alter their production facilities. They could potentially sue the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which approves all foreign investment transactions, even though this panel’s reviews are normally not subject to judicial oversight. The U.S. could try to restrict state-owned enterprises, but without broadly-written language, Chinese companies would be likely to circumvent such constraints. “We’ve talked to U.S. negotiators, they don’t seem disturbed by it,” Drake adds. “I’m disturbed that they’re not disturbed.”

AT Economy – Chinese FDI Fails

Chinese FDI undercuts the competitiveness of US firms – won’t boost our economyDavid Dayen, 3/18/16, The American Prospect, “The job-killing trade deal you’ve never heard of: the china bilateral investment treaty,” http://prospect.org/article/job-killing-trade-deal-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-china-bilateral-investment-treaty, mm

China currently protects many of its industries by excluding foreign investment in certain sectors. The key to the BIT is what’s known in trade deal parlance as the “negative list”—a list of which sectors would stay excluded. U.S. corporations want to whittle down that list and pry open more sectors where they can invest in China, and subsequently move production overseas.¶ On the flip side, there’s already substantial Chinese investment in the U.S.—more than U.S. investment in China, in fact—but we don’t have good information on its impact.

Many Chinese companies are state-owned or state-influenced, subsidized from home, and freed from having to run an immediate profit. Michael Wessel, a commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, warns that Chinese-subsidized firms could squeeze domestic competitors by undercutting them on price. Despite this uncertainty, Wessel contends that not single case study on Chinese-invested firms has been undertaken by an independent expert. “We have no idea what Chinese companies are doing in the U.S.,” he says. “Not all investment has [the] same impact. Our negotiators are flying blind.”

Chinese FDI won’t boost US growthMichael Wessel, 3/10/15, The hill, “growing US-china investment? not a BIT,” http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/235081-growing-us-china-investment-not-a-bit, mm

Chinese investment in the United States now outpaces U.S. investment in China. On the surface,

this might seem like good news. But, it’s far too early to know. Without more information and true transparency a BIT could have devastating consequences . China shouldn’t be rewarded with a BIT

while it continues to so blatantly flaunt the rules of international trade.¶ Chinese firms are on the march to acquire and invest in U.S. assets, all-too-often with their government’s financial support. The limited policy responses by China’s

trading partners have given them the resources to engage in this shopping and investing spree. Indeed, the United States’ failure to address China’s currency manipulation has helped stock that country currency stores which are being used to scoop up U.S. assets and expand China’s reach and influence.¶ Sure, in theory, Chinese investment in the U.S. might restore some of the jobs that America still needs. But fists-full of renminbi are being invested without any real understanding of the nature of these investments and their long-term impact on the U.S. economy, domestic production and employment.

Turn – Offshoring

A BIT causes massive outsourcing to ChinaDavid Dayen, 3/18/16, The American Prospect, “The job-killing trade deal you’ve never heard of: the china bilateral investment treaty,” http://prospect.org/article/job-killing-trade-deal-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-china-bilateral-investment-treaty, mm

The 2016 election has highlighted growing public opposition in both parties to the status-quo globalization agenda, which both sides blame for outsourcing jobs and privileging corporate profits over ordinary workers. This populist voter backlash puts trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on life support, and is forcing candidates to better explain how they would boost jobs and wages.¶ But what if those voters learned that the Obama administration is in the midst of negotiating yet

another corporate-friendly trade deal, one that would facilitate more offshoring, and that could also give China, of all countries, effective veto power over domestic policy?¶ That’s precisely what’s happening in behind-the-scenes negotiations over a little-publicized agreement on the table between the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies. Just as the White House is trying to sell TPP as a bulwark against China, the administration is simultaneously seeking an investment treaty with the Chinese that undercuts that argument.¶ “It really calls into question the contention of the Obama administration that they have a coherent strategy to integrate trade and international relations and national security,” says Barry Lynn, a senior fellow at New America. “It shows they have no idea what they’re doing.”¶ The deal is called the China Bilateral Investment Treaty, or

BIT. This is a standalone compact which would normally be negotiated as the investment chapter in a broader free trade agreement. Investment treaties provide a framework for foreign investors to pursue direct corporate ownership stakes in a partner country, offering them a series of guarantees of non-discriminatory treatment, limits on the expropriation of capital, and access to extra-judicial tribunals to enforce the agreement. The latter are set up through a system known as the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, which has expanded in scope in recent years as a key protection for foreign investors. In fact, ISDS has proven hugely controversial in the TPP debate, with critics charging it would allow corporations to overturn national laws that constrain their profits.¶ The U.S. has implemented 41 BITs over the years, as well as investment chapters in a dozen free-trade agreements. But the U.S. already attracts more foreign direct investment than any country in the world, with $168 billion flowing in just in 2012. That includes investments from countries that until now have lacked the protections of a BIT, like China. “It’s pitched as a way to promote investment,” said Celeste Drake, trade and globalization policy specialist at the AFL-CIO. “We’re one of the top countries for foreign investment anyway. We don’t need to give away rights for foreign investors.”¶ Few investors have the capital to undertake and manage businesses overseas. Invariably, large multinational corporations, or investment vehicles like hedge funds and private equity firms, engage in foreign direct investment. And a BIT offers them the ability to lock in profits while neutralizing the risks that go along with investing abroad.¶ For example, U.S. companies operating in China encounter local corruption, preferential treatment for their domestic producers, intellectual property theft, and ever-changing regulatory demands. The BIT sweeps away such hurdles, and allows foreign investors to use ISDS to recoup lost profits if foreign governments use those maneuvers to hamper their business. It effectively removes American companies’ one big motivation for keeping manufacturing stateside—our relatively stable judicial and regulatory systems and rule of law. If companies can get all that guaranteed in China, there’s nothing keeping their factories here. The BIT, then, is a recipe for more outsourcing.

AT Relations Advantage

AT BIT Solves Relations

The BIT won’t boost relationsBob Davis, 6/12/13, The Wall Street Journal, “US-China investment treaty: less than meets the eye,” http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/07/12/u-s-china-investment-treaty-less-than-meets-the-eye/, mm

But don’t count on a BIT changing anything in U.S.-China relations any time soon.¶ To start with, the

U.S. firms have been able to invest many billions of dollars in China without the help of such a treaty and China’s investment in the U.S. is ramping up as well –again, sans treaty.¶ And while it’s easy to start negotiations, it can be excruciating to put together anything meaningful and have it signed. (Witness the Doha global trade deal that’s been limping along for more than a decade with no signs that it will eventually be concluded.) And then, even if a deal is inked, it has to be passed by Congress, which is increasingly hostile to foreign trade deals.¶ “It’s a noble goal but one which will be very difficult to conclude in any reasonable time period and it might well fail,” says China scholar Nicholas Lardy at the Peterson Institute for International Trade in Washington DC. Another Washington think tanker who focuses on China, Derek Scissors of the Heritage Foundation, headlined his emailed comments: “An Investment Treaty with China: Don’t Hold Your Breath.”¶ Why the skepticism? Mr. Scissors explains that BIT’s generally are used to protect investors

from discriminatory policies. “They are not transformative instruments which change the nature of economies, especially not large economies,” he says.

BIT won’t solve CFIUS suspicion of SOEs (state owned enterprises)Jenny 2016 – political risk analyst based out of Hanoi, Vietnam, and contributor to Global Risk Insights (Nicolas, “Chinese overseas M&As: Where's the Sino-US bilateral investment treaty?,” http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/chinese-overseas-mas-wheres-the-sino-us-bilateral-investment-treaty)However, even a BIT is not the silver bullet some chalk it up to be. Beijing believes the Council on Foreign Investment in

the US (CFIUS) is singling out Chinese companies in order to impede US-bound Chinese investments. CFIUS was created under then President Ronald Reagan to examine foreign investments that could threaten national security. The inter-departmental committee, chaired by the Treasury alongside members of other government agencies (including the intelligence community),

receives notices of pending foreign investments and either approves or investigates further. The problem is that "national security", especially where the US government is concerned, is an ever-expanding concept. As a result, investments are now investigated for reasons once overlooked. While past investments were scrutinised only if linked to defence industries, they are now held up for buying up too large a share in a specific industry or for gaining access to sensitive technology, particularly in critical sectors (like energy and agriculture). The planned US$43 billion (S$59 billion) merger between agro-giants Syngenta and ChemChina is one of those being carefully scrutinised by CFIUS. While Syngenta is Swiss-owned, its biotech division is US-based and a leader in genetically modified seeds. ChemChina is essentially state-owned, enough to send alarm bells ringing throughout Capitol Hill. A group of congressmen led by Senator Chuck Grassley explicitly asked the Treasury to review the investment, saying they are "concerned about national security"; in particular, the effects of a Chinese company

gaining access to US technology and potentially compromising food security. US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has also expressed concerns. Such opposition can have a powerful effect on M&A deals. CFIUS might still scuttle the current Syngenta/ChemChina merger,

especially since Syngenta's facilities are located near key US military bases. In the first two months of this year alone, investigations undertaken by CFIUS resulted in three investments being abandoned by Chinese companies. A fourth deal, a proposed acquisition of Starwood by insurer Anbang, fell through after the Chinese company walked away over potential issues with China's own regulators. The Insurance Regulatory Commission allegedly opposed the deal because Chinese rules state

the outstanding value of overseas assets owned cannot exceed 15 per cent of a company's total assets. A BIT would do little to resolve such deep-rooted issues. For example, CFIUS has routinely put up roadblocks before proposed M&As with British, Canadian or Japanese companies. As long as China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are perceived as too closely aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, any acquisition would be interpreted as nationalisation.

BIT fails – no formal investment restrictions nowRosen and Hanemann 2011 – Daniel H. Rosen is Founder and China Practice leader of the Rhodium Group (RHG), a specialized firm advising the public and private sector. Mr. Rosen is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, where he has taught a graduate seminar on the Chinese economy at the School of International and Public Affairs since 2001. He is a Fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, where he has been affiliated since 1993. Thilo Hanemann is Research Director at the Rhodium Group. (“An American Open Door? Maximizing the Benefits of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment,” Center on U.S.-China Relations Asia Society and Kissinger Institute on China and the United States Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, http://asiasociety.org/files/pdf/AnAmericanOpenDoor_FINAL.pdf)Many observers believe the best way to promote inflows is by improving formal mechanisms— particularly by concluding a bilateral investment treaty with China. It is true that such an agreement would

send a powerful signal of our political commitment to boost bilateral FDI flows. However, the extent to which such an agreement would address the problems that Chinese investors confront in the United States is uncertain. Chinese investors already face few formal investment restrictions , after all, and their investments are protected by the robust U.S. legal system. 113 Though a bilateral investment treaty might help calm the debate about Chinese investment, it would not change national security reviews or the CFIUS process in any way.

Relations Resilient

US/China relations are resilientDaniel R. Russel, June 5 2014 Assistant Secretary, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee http://www.state.gov/p/eap/rls/rm/2014/06/228415.htm

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the establishment of official diplomatic relations between the United States and China. We have made remarkable progress since the era of back-channel messaging and secret trips. The scope of today’s U.S.-China relationship was unimaginable when President Nixon made his historic visit in 1972 to China. Yet there is still enormous potential for progress in the U.S.-China relationship. Progress that will yield benefits to the citizens of both countries, our neighbors, and the world. To realize this progress and these benefits, we seek to ensure that the relationship is not defined by strategic rivalry, but by fair and healthy competition, by practical cooperation on priority issues, and by constructive management of our differences and disagreements. Where interests

overlap, we will seek to expand cooperation with China. These areas include economic prosperity, a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue, and a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases. Where they diverge – and we have significant and well-known areas of

disagreement – we will work to ensure that our differences are constructively managed. Mr. Chairman, there are those who argue that cold war-like rivalry is inevitable and that the United States and China are condemned to a zero-sum struggle for supremacy, if not conflict. I reject such mechanistic thinking. As anyone who has served in government can tell you, this deterministic analysis overlooks the role of leaders who have the ability to set policy and to shape relationships. It gives short shrift to the fact that our two economies are becoming increasingly intertwined, which increases each side’s stake in the success of the other. It undervalues the fact that leaders in Washington and Beijing are fully cognizant of the risk of unintended strategic rivalry between an emerging power and an established power and have agreed to take deliberate actions to prevent such an outcome. And it ignores the reality of the past 35 years – that, in spite of our differences, U.S.-China relations have steadily grown deeper and stronger – and in doing so, we have built a very resilient relationship . We view China’s economic growth as complementary to the region’s prosperity, and China’s expanded role in the region can be complementary to the sustained U.S. strategic engagement in the Asia-Pacific. We and our partners in the region want China’s rise to contribute to the stability and continued development of the region. As President Obama and Secretary Kerry have made very clear, we do not seek to contain China; to the contrary, we welcome the emergence of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China. We believe all countries, and particularly emerging powers like China, should recognize the self-benefit of upholding basic rules and norms on which the international system is built; these are rules and norms which China has participated in formulating and shaping, and they are rules and norms that it continues to benefit from. In this context, we are encouraging China to exercise restraint in dealing with its neighbors and show respect for universal values and international law both at home and abroad.

Relations are resilient – no chance of collapseZhou Bo, July 31, 2014, Zhou Bo is an honorary fellow with Center of China-American Defense Relations, Academy of Military Science, PLA, China. http://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/sino-us-military-relationship-vulnerability-vs-resilience/

The Sino-American relationship is intrinsically imbued with two distinctive characteristics – vulnerability and resilience. The vulnerability is obvious, but the resilience is often overlooked. For example, in April 2001, a collision between an American EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese J-8 fighter killed a Chinese pilot. No matter how appalling the incident was, soon after the US government delivered its “letter of two sorries,” the Chinese government released the American crew. The crisis was basically resolved, in only 11 days. This year’s Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore appeared to be very much “soured” by the spat between participants from China and the US and Japan. However, the US later announced that four Chinese ships would attend RIMPAC 2014, a multilateral exercise hosted by the US Navy off of Hawaii. And the size of the Chinese participating task force is second to that of the US Navy. Such seemingly contradictory phenomena reflect a strong resilience and even a kind of maturity in the relationship between the two major powers. That is, if discord is unavoidable, you do what you can to avoid it from becoming a crisis. The resilience between China and the US has been sustained, first of all, by dialogue. There are over

90 dialogues of all sorts between the two countries, and quite a few of them are at the military-level. Even the S&ED has a security dialogue. The defense and security dialogues can provide a timely exchange of views and are therefore critically important. They help avoid unnecessary surprises and miscalculations and should be encouraged by all means. Cooperation between the two militaries has thus far been confined to “practical areas,” such as counter-piracy, maritime search and rescue, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. There are twelve areas that are restricted by a paranoid American Congress for fear that the PLA could benefit more than the US military from the interactions. But in recent years, more bilateral and multilateral exercises are held in “practical areas.” This is a great step forward. The US could continue inviting China for multilateral exercises, such as Cobra Gold and RIMPAC 2014 and accept PLA’s greater involvement. Likewise, the PLA could invite the US military to observe its exercises and visit more military facilities.

Relations are high and inevitable---both sides committedChen 15 - PhD, Associate Research Fellow for the Institute for International Strategic Studies at the Party School of Central Committee of C.P.C.(Jimin, “Risks Manageable for China-U.S. Relations,” June, http://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/risks-manageable-for-china-u-s-relations/)On May 16 and 17, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry paid his fifth visit to China, becoming the highest-level U.S. official

to visit China so far this year. According to the information released by the U.S. Department of State, the main purpose of this trip was to advance U.S. priorities ahead of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue this summer and the planned visit to the United States of President Xi Jinping this fall. However, U.S. officials revealed that Kerry’s visit would put pressure on China’s behavior, especially on the issue of South China Sea. For example, U.S. Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel said in prepared testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on May 13 that the United States was committed to maintaining freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea. During Kerry’s visit to Beijing this weekend, the United States would clearly demonstrate the determination to “push for respect for the rules and push back on unilateral actions to change the status quo”.∂ Moreover, both U.S. politics and academia are now filled with a tough argument on China, which might plunge Sino-US relations into a crisis. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal report, citing anonymous U.S. military officials, said the Pentagon was considering sending Navy surveillance aircraft as well as ships within 12 nautical miles to reefs and islands claimed by China in the South China Sea, taking practical actions to demonstrate the U.S. will and ability to protect its advocated “freedom of navigation”. In addition, the U.S. think tanks have also published reports on U.S. China policy. The Council on Foreign Relations in early March published one such report entitled “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China”, which recommended that the United States needs to restore a hard-line China policy, noting that“Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.”∂ There are also some people suggesting the emergence of two confrontation groups in the region. Since the year of 2014, the U.S.-Japan alliance has strengthened in unprecedented ways. Not long ago, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the United States, winning a high-profile reception. The two sides revised The Guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation, which promoted Japan to play a more active security role on a global scale. It also advanced the US-Japan alliance up to a new stage, that is, the United States continues to provide security guarantee for Japan, and Japan also provides more support to U.S. security. Meanwhile, from May 8-10, President Xi Jinping attended the “Victory Day Parade” in Moscow to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of the world’s anti-fascist war and paid his fourth visit to Russia since taking office. The two parties issued a joint statement to deepen the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination, which was the third one since the establishment of China’s new administration two years ago. In the joint statement, the two countries have emphasized mutually firm support and assistance on issues concerning core interests such as the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national security. It gives the outside world an impression that China and Russia increasingly move toward alliance, or have formed a “quasi-

alliance” relationship.∂ In reality , current China-U.S. relations are hardly as bad as it might seem on

the surface. Kerry’s visit reflects that Sino-US relationship is still on the right track , and the

differences between the countries are manageable . Kerry’s visit to China shows that both

sides attach great importance to the relationship. Despite the contradictions and differences , the

will of the top leaders of both countries to develop bilateral relations is strong and

consistent . From Sunnylands in 2013 to Zhongnanhai in 2014, the two heads of state have formed a high degree of consensus on this point. Kerry’s visit also indicates that high-level Sino-US communication channels are open and effective. At present, the two countries have established more than 90 kinds of communication mechanisms, including the important Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the High-Level

Consultation on People-to-People Exchange. These channels provide the foundation for managing disagreements and risks. In November 2014, the two sides established two mutual-trust

mechanisms, namely, “Notification of Major Military Activities [and] Confidence Building Measures Mechanism” and “Rules of Behavior for Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters”.

Such mechanisms and rules are extremely helpful and beneficial for both sides to reduce the

chance of conflicts or confrontations .

Relations are resilient---the last three decades prove they can compete and cooperate at onceRussel 14 - Assistant Secretary, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs(Daniel, “The Future of U.S.-China Relations,” Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lexis)Overall Bilateral RelationsThis year marks the 35th anniversary of the establishment of official diplomatic relations between the United States and China. We have made remarkable progress since the era of back-

channel messaging and secret trips. The scope of today’s U.S.-China relationship was unimaginable when President Nixon made his historic visit in 1972 to China.∂ Yet there is still enormous potential for progress in the U.S.-China relationship. Progress that will yield benefits to the citizens of both countries, our neighbors, and the world. To realize this progress and these benefits, we seek to ensure that the relationship is not defined by strategic rivalry, but by fair and healthy competition, by practical cooperation on priority issues, and by constructive management of our differences and

disagreements. Where interests overlap, we will seek to expand cooperation with China. These areas include economic prosperity, a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue, and a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases. Where they diverge – and we have significant and well-known areas of disagreement – we will work to ensure that our differences are constructively managed .∂ Mr.

Chairman, there are those who argue that cold war-like rivalry is inevitable and that the United States and China are condemned to a zero-sum struggle for supremacy, if not conflict. I reject such

mechanistic thinking. As anyone who has served in government can tell you, this deterministic analysis overlooks

the role of leaders who have the ability to set policy and to shape relationships. It gives short shrift to the fact that our two economies are becoming increasingly intertwined, which increases each side’s stake in the success of the other. It undervalues the fact that leaders in Washington and Beijing are fully cognizant of the risk of unintended strategic rivalry between an emerging power and an established power and have agreed to take deliberate actions to

prevent such an outcome . And it ignores the reality of the past 35 years – that, in spite of our

differences , U.S.-China relations have steadily grown deeper and stronger – and in doing so, we

have built a very resilient relationship .

This resilience will extend into the future---it’s in mutual interestDingli 15 – PhD, professor and Vice Dean at the Institute of International Studies, Fudan University. He is also the founder and director of China’s first non-government-based Program on Arms Control and Regional Security at Fudan University(Shen, “Maturing China-U.S. Ties to Breed Breakthroughs,” http://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/maturing-china-u-s-ties-to-breed-breakthroughs/)Such is the current China-US relationship. Contradictions accompany development, development overcomes contradictions; competition stimulates progress, progress facilitates equality. China-US relationship is such a gradually maturing new type of relations. The two countries will find more challenges in their face in the next few decades. But since they can’t afford the

consequences of confrontation, dialogue and cooperation will be their common choice .

There will be more cooperation as both parties mature in mindset.

AT Relations – AT SCS – Won’t Solve

Can’t solve ECS/SCS disputes – China wants to push the US out of the region – either means say no or proves China won’t follow the dealHugh White, 8/2/14, (professor of strategic studies t the national university of australia), Huffington Post, “why china and america are headed toward a catastrophic clash,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hugh-white/china-america-relations_b_5412014.html, mm

Many people find it hard to understand why China is acting the way it is in the East and South China Seas. What does Beijing hope to achieve by alienating its neighbors and undermining regional stability?¶ Let me suggest

an answer: China is trying to build what President Xi Jinping calls “a new model of great power relations.”

To understand how this might be the aim of Beijing’s actions, we have to recognize that under his “new model,” Xi wants China to wield much more power and influence in Asia than it has for the past few centuries. These things are inherently

zero-sum, so for China to have more power and influence, America must have less. This is what Xi and his

colleagues are trying to achieve.¶ Their reasoning is simple enough. They know that America’s position in Asia is built on its network of alliances and partnerships with many of China’s neighbors. They believe that weakening these relationships is the easiest way to weaken U.S. regional power. And they know that, beneath the flowery diplomatic phrases, the bedrock of these alliances and partnerships is the confidence America’s Asian friends have that America is able and willing to protect them from China’s power.¶ So the easiest way for Beijing to weaken Washington’s power in Asia is to undermine this confidence. And the easiest way to do that is for Beijing to press those friends and

allies hard on issues in which America’s own interests are not immediately engaged — like a string of maritime disputes in which the U.S. has no direct stake.¶ By using direct armed pressure in these disputes, China makes its neighbors more eager for U.S. military support, and at the same time makes America less willing to give it, because of the clear risk of a direct U.S.-China clash. In other words, by confronting America’s friends with force, China confronts America with the choice between deserting its friends and fighting China. Beijing is betting that, faced with this choice, America will back off and leave its allies and friends unsupported. This will weaken America’s alliances and partnerships, undermine U.S. power in Asia, and enhance China’s power.

AT Relations - AT SCS - Disputes =/= Conflict

ECS/SCS disputes won’t lead to conflict – no incentive to escalateRonan Tse-min Fu, Fall 2015, (doctoral candidate in the political science and international relations program at the university of southern california), Foreign Affairs, “looking for asia’s security dilemma,” 40(2), Project Muse, mm

The most common explanation for East Asian states’ muted military response to China’s rise is the existence of a robust U.S. security guarantee that reassures allies and deters rivals.16 Given that the military expenditures of most Asia Pacific countries have gradually declined for the past quarter century despite “China’s surging defense budget” (p. 67), and that the United States continues to “pivot” and increase its forward military deployment (p. 82), it might be that the region feels safer because of the U.S. military presence. If so, U.S.-China security competition would be a cause for concern, but not China–East Asian security competition. Yet Liff and Ikenberry miss this key argument—the bulk of their article focuses primarily on China–East Asian security dynamics (pp. 65–82). Either states are free riding on U.S. defense commitments and hence not spending what they might, or they have doubts about the U.S. military guarantee against all contingencies. Liff and Ikenberry cannot simultaneously argue that states are afraid of China and desperately arming themselves but also unafraid of China given the U.S. security guarantee (p. 88).¶ Although the U.S. alliance system may mitigate national security concerns for some Asian countries, it is unlikely to reassure every one of them. After all, the U.S. security

guarantee is not a blanket guarantee for all military contingencies. There is a simpler explanation for continued low military expenditures for both allies and non-allies in the region: few states fear for their survival; hence they are not arming as much as Liff and Ikenberry suggest.17 Although China’s maritime claims are expansive, they are not new, nor are they increasing.18 And most important, China is unlikely to embark on territorial expansion.19 Direct military competition with China is thus unwarranted. The United States and China may be competing for regional hegemony, but few other states feel the necessity to choose sides. Given that the stakes are fairly low, it is not surprising that few states appear willing to make the costly domestic and economic trade-offs required for major sustained investments in their militaries.

No miscalculation—tons of safeguards Hensler 10/6/15 – Director of Operations, Operational Level Programs, within the College of Operational and Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. A retired Navy Judge Advocate General, Prof. Henseler took part in FONOPS over the course of his 20-year naval career and frequently lectures on Law of the Sea issues. Sean P., Why We Need South China Sea Freedom of Navigation Patrols, The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2015/10/why-we-need-south-china-sea-freedom-of-navigation-patrols/The United States recently concluded agreements with the PRC designed to reduce the likelihood of miscalculation during unplanned encounters between ships and aircraft of the two nations. The United States has also increased its military-to-military engagement with the PRC in recent years, to include hosting each other’s senior officers, conducting a U.S. 7th Fleet flagship port visit to China, and inviting China to participate in a major exercise involving several Pacific nations called RIMPAC. Recently, when several Chinese warships sailed within 12 nautical miles (NM) of the United States in the Aleutian Islands asserting their freedom of navigation right of innocent passage, the U.S. response was to acknowledge Chinese rights. Finally, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping recently met

and one of the issues discussed was the U.S. objection to Chinese actions in the SCS that impinge upon freedom of navigation. Taken in sum, these deliberate actions have mitigated the risk of escalation and miscalculation to the extent that the conduct of U.S. FONOPs, synchronized with unambiguous strategic

communication, is a low risk endeavor from a strategic perspective.¶ Given the tremendous benefits that will accrue to the United States by conducting FONOPs, and in light of the mitigated potential disadvantages, Washington should plan to conduct FONOPs as soon as possible in order to assert its vital interest in the freedom of navigation.

China will be restrained in the SCS—recent behavior proves, plus Xi wants stability to pursue domestic reformsPaal 15 – previously served as vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase International and as unofficial U.S. representative to Taiwan as director of the American Institute in TaiwanDouglas H., China, the U.S., and the Coming Taiwan Transition, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/12/29/china-u.s.-and-coming-taiwan-transition/ioeiAmbitions such as this one for the PLA may be part of what lies behind the extraordinary tactical readjustments of Chinese foreign policy over the past

year. After two major conferences on Chinese foreign policy presided over by Xi in 2013 and 2014, China’s post-Olympic, post-global financial crisis

period of assertiveness toward its neighbors and the United States has morphed since last autumn into fence mending and economic courtship. Some might call it a tactical retreat. I call it a counterbalance to the American rebalance; that is, Beijing’s efforts to reduce opportunities for the U.S. to build influence on China’s periphery. ¶ For example, Beijing has resisted over-reacting to a U.S. freedom of navigation challenge in the South China Sea, coming not long after Xi’s state visit to the U.S. And China has positively responded at least procedurally to a U.S. initiative to combat cyber theft. China muted its “principled” negative reaction to a U.S. arms sales package for Taiwan that was announced in December, after

the U.S. sized the package to avoid provocation. Tensions are down with Japan in the waters around the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea. Xi has swallowed hard and met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe twice and permitted Premier Li Keqiang to attend a trilateral with Japan hosted by South Korea. ¶ Moreover,

after a surge of land filling in the South China Sea this past summer, Xi has moved to lower diplomatic temperatures, attending the Philippines’ hosted Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ forum in Manila, and avoiding new tensions with Vietnam. Emblematically, the Communist Party graciously hosted Myanmar democratic leader Aung

San Suu Kyi in Beijing after decades of giving her a cold shoulder.¶ Parallel to this spate of tension reductions, China has launched substantial initiatives known as the One Belt, One Road projects to deepen infrastructure cooperation with China’s immediate neighbors and beyond. Beijing created the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to begin to meet the

region’s infrastructure financing needs. China is not going to make allies of these skeptical neighbors, but it may make them think harder about choosing, for example, to side with the United States when China takes a different position.¶ I term this tactical shift around China’s periphery “Beijing’s counterbalance” to the Obama administration’s “rebalance” or “pivot.” The U.S. made diplomatic and security inroads in China’s neighborhood after China grew uglier and assertive in the post-2008 environment. China’s neighbors generally wanted a greater U.S. presence (excluding Vladimir Putin’s Russia). Myanmar’s effort to loosen China’s grip is a good example, as it turned away from China to democracy and the United States. Xi Jinping seems to have taken stock and decided China can do better.¶ Such a reevaluation

would comport with Xi’s other needs as well. The vast economic and other reforms proposed in the Third Plenum of 2013,

including the reorganization of the PLA, a nationwide anti-corruption campaign, achieving the “China Dream,” and doubling the GDP, would all call for a calm external environment. From a Chinese perspective, China can afford to get its act together at home now and emerge the stronger for it to deal with foreign policy matters later.

AT Relations – AT Warming – Won’t Solve

China will never genuinely cooperate on warming – won’t cut emissionsAdams and Peiser 2015- Part of Global Warming Policy Foundation, Ph.D in Cultural Science (Benny Peiser and Patricia Adams, “China won’t cut back on its CO2 emissions”

China won’t commit to curbing its fossil fuel use; instead, it will squeeze the West for billions in climate subsidies. That’s the conclusion of a study released today by economist Patricia Adams of Toronto-based Probe

International for U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation. China won’t cut back on its CO2 emissions China will talk a good game at the UN’s upcoming Climate Conference in Paris but won’t make any binding commitments, concludes The Truth About China , an important new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “China’s Communist Party has as its highest priority its own self-preservation, and that self-preservation depends overwhelmingly on its ability to continue raising the standard of living of its citizens,” states economist Patricia Adams, the study’s author and the executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, an organization that has worked closely with Chinese NGOs for decades. “With China’s economic growth faltering, the last thing the Communist Party wants is to hobble its economy further by curtailing the use of the fossil fuels upon which its economy depends. A major cutback in

fossil fuel use represents an existential threat to the Communist Party’s rule. It simply isn’t going to happen.” Adams’s report includes another important finding: tackling CO2 emissions would do little if anything to curb the serious air pollution – dubbed “airpocalypse” – plaguing China’s major cities. On the contrary, the measures needed to curb China’s smog of life-threatening pollutants such as nitrogen and sulphur oxides – scrubbers on power plants, for example – actually increase CO2 emissions. “A programme to rapidly reduce pollutants harmful to human health would be at odds with a programme to reduce CO2,” Adams states, noting that human health is unaffected by CO2, a colourless, odourless, tasteless gas. Next to keeping its economy afloat, the biggest challenge to its credibility that the Communist leadership faces is its need to reduce smog. “I have never heard of a public protest in China against carbon dioxide emissions,” Adams states. “CO2 is a major concern for Western NGOs with offices in Beijing but it’s a non-issue for Chinese citizens and environmentalists at the grassroots.” All that China will commit to, says the Adams report, is to continue to improve the energy efficiency of its economy as it grows – a goal it has long pursued, independent of global warming concerns. In doing so, China aims to increase its GDP along with its fossil fuel use, and by 2030 or so will depend on fossil fuels for 80% of its energy use, down from today’s 90%. When it reaches 80% 15 years hence, its energy makeup will largely resemble America’s today.

China won’t follow through on cutting emissions – cooperation irrelevant Bastasch 2015- Degree in Political Science from Portland University, Writer for the Daily Caller (Michael Bastasch, “China Can’t be Trusted to Fight Global Warming,” http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/02/paper-china-cant-be-trusted-to-fight-global-warming/)China is making big pledges to fight global warming at the United Nations climate talks, including a new one to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 60 percent in five years. But take these pledges with a grain of salt, says a veteran economist who works extensively in China, because “China’s Communist Party knows that to stay in power – its highest priority – it must maintain the economic

growth rates that have raised the incomes of much of its population and kept opposition at bay.” “With China’s economic growth faltering, the last thing the Communist Party wants is to hobble its economy further by curtailing the use of the fossil fuels upon which its economy depends,” writes economist Patricia Adams, the

executive director of the Toronto-based Probe International — a group that works closely with Chinese NGOs. “A major cutback in fossil fuel use represents an existential threat to the Communist Party’s rule. It simply isn’t going to happen,” writes Adams in a new paper published by the U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation. China has made several major promises in the last year to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the coming years, boosting hopes among environmentalists the communist country will sign a legally binding U.N. climate treaty. Most recently, China’s government promised to cut emissions from the power sector 60 percent by 2020, but gave no specifics on how this will be achieved. It’s announcement of further CO2 cuts comes as world leaders hash out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol in Paris. “China also knows that Western leaders’ have no firm expectation of concrete commitments in Paris,” she notes. “Rather, their paramount goal is to maintain face at the Paris talks, which would collapse without China’s presence. China is deftly preparing the stage in Paris to

position itself as the Third World’s defender and also as a recipient of the billions in climate aid that it is demanding from the West.” “We can expect more announcements, agreements, and soaring rhetoric from global politicians at the Paris Conference, along with an agreement to meet again next year,” Adams writes. “What we cannot expect are reforms designed to reduce China’s carbon emissions.” Environmentalists also hope China’s horrible air quality will encourage the country to tackle CO2 emissions. A recent report from the nonprofit Berkeley Earth claims Chinese air pollution kills some 4,000 people a day. But hoping air pollution worries will curb CO2 is a false hope, says Adams. “A programme to rapidly reduce pollutants harmful to human health would be at odds with a programme to reduce CO2,” writes Adams, adding that CO2 is a colorless, odorless gas that has no effect on human health. “The opposite is true,” writes Adams. “Not only do the goals of reducing carbon emissions and air pollution not reinforce each other, they conflict… Efforts to reduce it rely on unproven abatement technologies, and are prohibitively expensive. In contrast, abating air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide rely on proven technologies and are relatively inexpensive.” The U.S. had a similar experience in dealing with air pollutants. Since 1980, air pollution has fallen 63 percent due to regulations and new technologies all while CO2 emissions increased 17 percent, according to federal data. The U.S. has recently seen a dip in CO2 emissions, but this is almost entirely due to increased natural gas use thanks to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. “I have never heard of a public protest in China against carbon dioxide emissions,” notes Adams. “CO2 is a major concern for Western NGOs with offices in Beijing but it’s a non-issue for Chinese citizens and environmentalists at the grassroots.” There are other reasons to be pessimistic about China’s pledge to cut CO2 emissions. First, China has tripled its coal use since 2000 and plans on increasing it

another 16 percent by 2020 — coal use has been key to reducing poverty in China. China also has plans to build 155 new coal- fired power plants in the coming years. It’s not clear if all will be built because of policy changes or economic conditions, but it suggests China is more serious about growing its economy than cutting CO2 emissions. Second, China won’t be able to make substantial cuts to CO2 emissions — even if it wanted to — if it’s unable to maintain high levels of economic growth. If the recent slowdown in China’s economy continues, it could derail any attempts to cut CO2 . “I think low growth makes it more difficult to achieve their target,” says Shoichi Itoh with Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). “They want to reduce energy consumption and emissions for their own purposes,” Itoh says. “If Chinese economy slows down, they can’t expect people to pay more for energy. So people might lose their appetite for reducing emissions.” On the other hand, China will find ways to use energy more efficiently like every other advanced economy has in past decades. This will help decrease the energy intensity of

economic growth, but it won’t decouple growth from energy use. “China will entrench cleaner-burning fossil fuels in its economy, costing the West its leverage over China’s energy policies,” Adams writes. “China’s leadership knows that what China says to the West is more important than what China does, absolving it of the need to make any binding commitment to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.”

AT Relations – AT Warming – Not Human Caused

Warming is not anthropogenic—comparative climate models prove a) the climate is not as sensitive as previously though and b) Co2 concentrations can’t explain past warmingSpencer 8 –former head climate scientist @ NASA (Roy, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama, former senior scientist for climate studied at NASA and now leads the U.S. science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS on NASA’s Aqua satellite. [http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/global-warming-as-a-natural-response/] “Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)”/December 29)

A simple climate model forced by satellite-observed changes in the Earth’s radiative budget associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is shown to mimic the major features of global average temperature change during the 20th Century – including three-quarters of the warming trend. A mostly-natural source of global warming is also consistent with mounting observational evidence that the climate system is much less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than the IPCC’s climate models simulate. 1. INTRODUCTION The main arguments for global warming being manmade go something like this: “What else COULD it be? After all, we know that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations are sufficient to explain recent warming, so what’s the point of looking for any other cause?” But for those who have followed my writings and publications in the last 18 months (e.g. Spencer et al., 2007; Spencer, 2008), you know that we are finding satellite evidence that the climate system is much less sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) climate models suggest that it is. And if that is true, then mankind’s CO2 emissions are not strong enough to have caused the global warming we’ve seen over the last 100 years. To show that we are not the only researchers who have documented evidence contradicting the IPCC models on the subject of climate sensitivity, I made the following figure (Fig. 1) to contrast the IPCC-projected warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the warming that would result if the climate sensitivity is as low as implied by various kinds of observational evidence.The dashed line in Fig. 1 comes from our recent apples-to-apples comparison between satellite-based feedback estimates and IPCC model-diagnosed feedbacks, all computed from 5-year periods (see Fig. 2). In that comparison, there were NO five year periods from ANY of the IPCC model simulations which produced a feedback parameter with as low a climate sensitivity as that found in the satellite data .The discrepancy between the models and observations seen in Figs. 1 and 2 is stark. If the sensitivity of the climate system is as low as some of these observational results suggest, then the IPCC models are grossly in error, and we have little to fear from manmade global warming. [I am told that the 1.1 deg. C sensitivity of Schwartz (2007) has more recently been revised upward to 1.9 deg. C.] But it also means that the radiative forcing caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 is not sufficient to cause PAST warming, either. So, this then leaves a critical unanswered question: What has caused the warming seen over the last 100 years or so? Here I present new evidence that most of the warming could be the result of a natural cycle in cloud cover forced by a well-known mode of natural climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). While the PDO is primarily a geographic rearrangement in atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns in the North Pacific, it is well known that such regional changes can also influence weather patterns over much larger areas, for instance North America or the entire Northern Hemisphere (which is, by the way, the region over which the vast majority of global warming has occurred). The IPCC has simply ASSUMED that these natural fluctuations in weather patterns do not cause climate change. But all it would take is a small change in global average (or Northern Hemispheric average) cloudiness to cause global warming. Unfortunately, our global observations of cloudiness have not been complete or accurate enough to document such a change…until recently.

Models only replicate a pattern, its impossible for them to determine the actual mechanism of warming Taylor 9—science analyst and policy advisor** **Science analyst and policy advisor with over 30 years’ experience as a consultant to environmental NGOs, (particularly Greenpeace) government departments and agencies, intergovernmental bodies, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the UN. (Peter“Chill—A reassessment of global warming theory” pgs 24-6)

IPCC makes clear that the only method available to distinguish the current pattern of warming from natural fluctuations in the global mean temperature is by computer simulation. In that process, a virtual planetary ecosystem, or model, is created that attempts to mimic the past pattern of temperature fluctuating. This is the fundamental basis of the IPCC approach. The great majority of climate studies are built upon these models. The only way such models can be validated is if they replicate the past fluctuations of temperature. But as we shall see, even this test is not reliable. The Panel conclude that the suite of models used is reasonably successful in mimicking this past variability but they do so only if they include the factors for enhanced concentrations of human-sourced greenhouse gases. If the models are run using natural factors alone, then they diverge as seen in Fig. 1, taken from the latest 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC in 2007. The Panel holds that the spike of the 1980-2000 period cannot be simulated without the input of these emissions. This is the crux of the IPCC case and the first question a critical reviewer asks is whether the model has included all of the relevant factors relating to the natural environment. Has there been anything unusual happening naturally that parallels the temperature rise? And how reliable are the inputs relating to greenhouse gases? It is not uncommon for models to replicate a pattern

but not the actual mechanisms involved . In the analysis that follows, I shall demonstrate that this is exactly what has happened. There are unusual natural circumstances in the late twentieth century. Furthermore, the models have recently been shown to have falsely replicated the pattern, something admitted to but obscured in the IPCC Working Group Reports. In the scientific detail the Panel regularly admit that the modellers’ grasp of natural fluctuations is very limited . This ought to mean that the flat line from 1950 onwards in

Fig. 1 is not reliable, yet it is upon the difference between these two lines that IPCC rests its whole case.

AT Relations - AT Warming – No Impact

No mass extinctionWillis 10 – PhD in Plant Science @ Cambridge, Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and an adjunct Professor in Biology at the University of Bergen. She holds the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford(Kathy, Keith D. Bennett, Shonil A. Bhagwat& H. John B. Birks, “4 °C and beyond: what did this mean for biodiversity in the past?,” Systematics and Biodiversity, 8.1)The most recent climate models and fossil evidence for the early Eocene Climatic Optimum (53–51 million years ago) indicate that during this time interval atmospheric CO2 would have exceeded 1200ppmv and tropical temperatures were between 5–10 ◦ C warmer than modern values (Zachos et al., 2008). There is also evidence for relatively rapid intervals of extreme global warmth and massive carbon addition when global temperatures increased by 5 ◦ C in less than 10 000 years (Zachos et al., 2001). So what was the response of biota to these ‘climate extremes’ and do we see the large-scale extinctions (especially in the Neotropics) predicted by some of the most recent models associated with future climate changes (Huntingford et al., 2008)? In fact the fossil

record for the early Eocene Climatic Optimum demonstrates the very opposite. All the evidence from low-latitude

records indicates that, at least in the plant fossil record, this was one of the most biodiverse intervals of time in the Neotropics(Jaramillo et al., 2006). It was also a time when the tropical forest biome was the most extensive in Earth’s history, extending to mid-latitudes in both the northern and southern hemispheres – and there was also no ice at the Poles and Antarctica was covered by needle-leaved forest (Morley, 2007). There were certainly novel ecosystems, and an increase in community turnover with a mixture of tropical and temperate species in mid latitudes and plants persisting in areas that are currently polar deserts. [It should be noted; however, that at the earlier Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at 55.8 million years ago in the US Gulf Coast, there was a rapid vegetation response to climate change. There was major compositional turnover, palynological richness decreased, and regional extinctions occurred (Harrington & Jaramillo, 2007). Reasons for these changes are unclear, but they may have resulted from continental drying, negative feedbacks on vegetation to changing CO2 (assuming that CO2 changed during the PETM), rapid cooling immediately after the PETM, or subtle changes in plant–animal interactions (Harrington & Jaramillo, 2007).]

No impact---mitigation and adaptation will solve---no tipping point or “1% risk” argsMendelsohn 9 - Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies(Robert O., Yale University, June 2009, “Climate Change and Economic Growth,” http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/documents/gcwp060web.pdf)The heart of the debate about climate change comes from a number of warnings from scientists and others that give the impression that human-induced climate change is an immediate threat to society (IPCC 2007a,b; Stern 2006). Millions of people might be vulnerable to health effects (IPCC 2007b), crop production might fall in the low latitudes (IPCC 2007b), water supplies might dwindle (IPCC 2007b), precipitation might fall in arid regions (IPCC 2007b), extreme events will grow exponentially (Stern 2006), and between 20–30 percent of species will risk extinction (IPCC 2007b). Even worse, there may be catastrophic events such as the melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets causing severe sea level rise, which would inundate hundreds of millions of people (Dasgupta et al. 2009). Proponents argue there is no time to waste. Unless greenhouse gases are cut dramatically today, economic growth and well‐being

may be at risk (Stern 2006). These statements are largely alarmist and misleading . Although climate change is a serious problem that deserves attention, society’s immediate behavior has an extremely low probability of leading to catastrophic consequences . The science and economics of climate change is quite clear that emissions over the next few decades will lead to only mild consequences . The severe impacts predicted by alarmists require a century (or

two in the case of Stern 2006) of no mitigation . Many of the predicted impacts assume there will be no or little adaptation. The net economic impacts from climate change over the next 50 years will be small regardless. Most of the more severe impacts will take more than a century or even a millennium to unfold and many of these “potential” impacts will never occur because

people will adapt . It is not at all apparent that immediate and dramatic policies need to be developed to thwart long ‐ range climate risks . What is needed are long‐run balanced responses.

AT Relations – AT Warming – Slow

Warming will be slow and the impact will be smallRidley 6/19/14, (Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, a columnist for the Times (London) and a member of the House of Lords. He spoke at Ideacity in Toronto on June 18., “PCC commissioned models to see if global warming would reach dangerous levels this century. Consensus is ‘no’” , [ http://tinyurl.com/mgyn8ln ] , //hss-RJ)The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact there is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I hold, which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind this century. After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on this topic for various media organizations, and having started out alarmed, that’s where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this view. I share it with a very large international organization, sponsored by the United Nations and supported by virtually all the world’s governments: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself. The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate, given a certain assumption about the atmosphere’s “sensitivity” to carbon dioxide. Three of the models show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer. Now two degrees is the threshold at which warming starts to turn dangerous, according to the scientific consensus. That is to say, in three of the four scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my children’s children are elderly, the earth will still not have experienced any harmful warming, let alone catastrophe. But what about the fourth scenario? This is known as RCP8.5, and it produces 3.5 degrees of warming in 2081-2100. Curious to know what assumptions lay behind this model, I decided to look up the original papers describing the creation of this scenario. Frankly, I was gobsmacked. It is a world that is very, very implausible. For a start, this is a world of “continuously increasing global population” so that there are 12 billion on the planet. This is more than a billion more than the United Nations expects, and flies in the face of the fact that the world population growth rate has been falling for 50 years and is on course to reach zero – i.e., stable population – in around 2070. More people mean more emissions. Second, the world is assumed in the RCP8.5 scenario to be burning an astonishing 10 times as much coal as today, producing 50% of its primary energy from coal, compared with about 30% today. Indeed, because oil is assumed to have become scarce, a lot of liquid fuel would then be derived from coal. Nuclear and renewable technologies contribute little, because of a “slow pace of innovation” and hence “fossil fuel technologies continue to dominate the primary energy portfolio over the entire time horizon of the RCP8.5 scenario.” Energy efficiency has improved very little. These are highly unlikely assumptions. With abundant natural gas displacing coal on a huge scale in the United States today, with the price of solar power plummeting, with nuclear power experiencing a revival, with gigantic methane-hydrate gas resources being discovered on the seabed, with energy efficiency rocketing upwards, and with population growth rates continuing to fall fast in virtually every country in the world, the one thing we can say about RCP8.5 is that it is very, very implausible. Notice, however, that even so, it is not a world of catastrophic

pain. The per capita income of the average human being in 2100 is three times what it is now. Poverty would be history. So it’s hardly Armageddon. But there’s an even more startling fact. We now have many different studies of climate sensitivity based on observational data and they all converge on the conclusion that it is much lower than assumed by the IPCC in these models. It has to be, otherwise global temperatures would have risen much faster than they have over the past 50 years. As Ross McKitrick noted on this page earlier this week, temperatures have not risen at all now for more than 17 years. With these much more realistic estimates of sensitivity (known as “transient climate response”), even RCP8.5 cannot produce dangerous warming. It manages just 2.1C of warming by 2081-2100. That is to say, even if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption till you have an edifice of vanishingly small probability, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage in the time of our grandchildren, let alone catastrophe. That’s not me saying this – it’s the IPCC itself. But what strikes me as truly fascinating about these scenarios is that they tell us that globalization, innovation and economic growth are unambiguously good for the environment. At the other end of the scale from RCP8.5 is a much more cheerful scenario called RCP2.6. In this happy world, climate change is not a problem at all in 2100, because carbon dioxide emissions have plummeted thanks to the rapid development of cheap nuclear and solar, plus a surge in energy efficiency. The RCP2.6 world is much, much richer. The average person has an income about 15 times today’s in real terms, so that most people are far richer than Americans are today. And it achieves this by free trade, massive globalization, and lots of investment in new technology. All the things the green movement keeps saying it opposes because they will wreck the planet. The answer to climate change is, and always has been, innovation. To worry now in 2014 about a very small, highly implausible set of circumstances in 2100 that just might, if climate sensitivity is much higher than the evidence suggests, produce a marginal damage to the world economy, makes no sense. Think of all the innovation that happened between 1914 and 2000. Do we really think there will be less in this century? As for how to deal with that small risk, well there are several possible options. You could encourage innovation and trade. You could put a modest but growing tax on carbon to nudge innovators in the right direction. You could offer prizes for low-carbon technologies. All of these might make a little sense. But the one thing you should not do is pour public subsidy into supporting old-fashioned existing technologies that produce more carbon dioxide per unit of energy even than coal (bio-energy), or into ones that produce expensive energy (existing solar), or that have very low energy density and so require huge areas of land (wind). The IPCC produced two reports last year. One said that the cost of climate change is likely to be less than 2% of GDP by the end of this century. The other said that the cost of decarbonizing the world economy with renewable energy is likely to be 4% of GDP. Why do something that you know will do more harm than good?

Warming is slow – no risk of an impactMichaels and Knappenberger 11/19/13, (*Chip Knappenberger is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, and coordinates the scientific and outreach activities for the Center. He has over 20 years of experience in climate research and public outreach, including 10 years with the Virginia State Climatology Office and 15 years as the Research Coordinator for New Hope Environmental Services, Inc, **Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Michaels is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He was a research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for thirty years. Michaels was a contributing author and is a reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chanage, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, “With or Without a “Pause” Climate Models Still Project Too Much Warming”, [ http://www.cato.org/blog/or-without-pause-climate-models-still-project-too-much-warming ] //hss-RJ)A new paper just hit the scientific literature that argues that the apparent pause in the rise in global average surface temperatures during the past 16 years was really just a slowdown. As you may imagine, this paper, by Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way is being hotly discussed in the global warming blogs, with reaction ranging from a warm embrace by the global-warming-is-going-to-be-bad-for-us crowd to revulsion from the human-activities-have-no-effect-on-the-climate claque. The lukewarmers (a school we take some credit for establishing) seem to be taking the results in stride. After all, the “pause” as curious as it is/was, is not central to the primary argument that, yes, human activities are pressuring the planet to warm, but that the rate of warming is going to be much slower than is being projected by the collection of global climate models (upon which mainstream projections of future climate change—and the resulting climate alarm (i.e., calls for emission regulations, etc.)—are based). Under the adjustments to the observed global temperature history put together by Cowtan and Way, the models fare a bit better than they do with the unadjusted temperature record. That is, the observed temperature trend over the past 34 years (the period of record analyzed by Cowtan and Way) is a tiny bit closer to the average trend from the collection of climate models used in the new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) than is the old temperature record. Specifically, while the trend in observed global temperatures from 1979-2012 as calculated by Cowtan and Way is

0.17°C/decade, it is 0.16°C/decade in the temperature record compiled by the U.K. Hadley Center (the record that Cowtan and Way adjusted). Because of the sampling errors associated with trend estimation, these values are not significantly different from one another. Whether the 0.17°C/decade is significantly different from the climate model average simulated trend during that period of 0.23°C/decade is discussed extensively below. But, suffice it

to say that an insignificant difference of 0.01°C/decade in the global trend measured over more than 30 years is pretty small beer and doesn’t give model apologists very much to get happy over. Instead, the attention is being deflected to “The Pause”—the leveling off of global surface temperatures during the past 16 years (give or take). Here, the new results from Cowtan and Way show that during the period 1997-2012, instead of a statistically insignificant rise at a rate of 0.05°C/decade as is contained in the “old” temperature record, the rise becomes a statistically significant 0.12°C/decade. “The Pause” is transformed into “The Slowdown” and alarmists rejoice because global warming hasn’t stopped after all. (If the logic sounds backwards, it does to us as well, if you were worried about catastrophic global warming, wouldn’t you rejoice at findings that indicate that future climate change was going to be only modest, more so than results to the contrary?) The science behind the new Cowtan and Way research is still being digested by the community of climate scientists and other interested parties alike. The main idea is that the existing compilations of the global average temperature are very data-sparse in the high latitudes. And since the Arctic (more so than the Antarctic) is warming faster than the global average, the lack of data there may mean that the global average temperature trend may be underestimated. Cowtan and Way developed a methodology which relied on other limited sources of temperature information from the Arctic (such as floating buoys and satellite observations) to try to make an estimate of how the surface temperature was behaving in regions lacking more traditional temperature observations (the authors released an informative video explaining their research which may better help you understand what they did). They found that the warming in the data-sparse regions was progressing faster than the global average (especially during the past couple of years) and that when they included the data that they derived for these regions in the computation of the global average temperature, they found the global trend was higher than previously reported—just how much higher depended on the period over which the trend was calculated. As we showed, the trend more than doubled over the period from 1997-2012, but barely increased at all over the longer period 1979-2012. Figure 1 shows the impact on the global average temperature trend for all trend lengths between 10 and 35 years (incorporating our educated guess as to what the 2013 temperature anomaly will be), and compares that to the distribution of climate model simulations of the same period. Statistically speaking, instead of there being a clear inconsistency (i.e., the observed trend value falls outside of the range which encompasses 95% of all modeled trends) between the observations and the climate mode simulations for lengths ranging generally from 11 to 28 years and a marginal inconsistency (i.e., the observed trend value falls outside of the range which encompasses 90% of all modeled trends) for most of the other lengths, now the observations track closely the marginal inconsistency line, although trends of length 17, 19, 20, 21 remain clearly inconsistent with the collection of modeled trends. Still, throughout the entirely of the 35-yr period (ending in 2013), the observed trend lies far below the model average simulated trend (additional information on the impact of the new Cowtan and Way adjustments on modeled/observed temperature comparison can be found here). The Cowtan and Way analysis is an attempt at using additional types of temperature information , or extracting “information” from records that have already told their stories, to fill in the missing data in the Arctic. There are concerns about the appropriateness of both the data sources and the methodologies applied to them. A major one is in the applicability of satellite data at such high latitudes. The nature of the satellite’s orbit forces it to look “sideways” in order to sample polar regions. In fact, the orbit is such that the highest latitude areas cannot be seen at all. This is compounded by the fact that cold regions can develop substantial “inversions” of near-ground temperature, in which temperature actually rises with height such that there is not a straightforward relationship between the surface temperature and the temperature of the lower atmosphere where the satellites measure the temperature. If the nature of this complex relationship is not constant in time, an error is introduced into the Cowtan and Way analysis. Another unresolved problem comes up when extrapolating land-based

weather station data far into the Arctic Ocean. While land temperatures can bounce around a lot, the fact that much of the ocean is partially ice-covered for many months. Under “well-mixed” conditions, this forces the near-surface temperature to be constrained to values near the freezing point of salt water, whether or not the associated land station is much warmer or colder. You can run this experiment yourself by filling a glass with a mix of ice and water and then making sure it is well mixed. The water surface temperature must hover around 33°F until all the ice melts. Given that the near-surface temperature is close to the water temperature, the limitations of land data become obvious. Considering all of the above, we advise caution with regard to Cowtan and Way’s findings. While adding high arctic data should increase the observed trend, the nature of the data means that the amount of additional rise is subject to further revision. As they themselves note, there’s quite a bit more work to be done this area. In the meantime, their results have tentatively breathed a small hint of life back into the climate models, basically buying them a bit more time—time for either the observed temperatures to start rising rapidly as current models expect, or, time for the modelers to try to fix/improve cloud processes, oceanic processes, and other process of variability (both natural and anthropogenic) that lie behind what would be the clearly overheated projections. We’ve also taken a look at how “sensitive” the results are to the length of the ongoing pause/slowdown. Our educated guess is that the “bit” of time that the Cowtan and Way findings bought the models is only a few years long, and it is a fact, not a guess, that each additional year at the current rate of lukewarming increases the disconnection between the models and reality.

AT Add-On’s

AT China Econ – Won’t Solve

BIT won’t boost Chinese growth – other internal reforms are keyRobert Held, 6/29/16, Asia Times, “China: Why reciprocity in market access is pivotal,” http://atimes.com/2016/06/china-why-reciprocity-in-market-access-is-pivotal/, mm

While signs seem positive in that regard, the economic benefits that China could reap from a BIT could be rendered void by China’s systemic internal shortfalls unless the Chinese leadership decides to embark on economic reforms in earnest. Without more reform, concerns that the People’s Republic under Xi Jinping’s aegis will go down a dark path, characterized by the continuous sheltering of the dysfunctional state enterprise sector, a sector that lives under CCP’s wing, will only grow.

AT China Econ – Impact Defense

No CCP collapse—the CCP is resilientPei 09 (Minxin, Senior Associate in the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 3/12. “Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Crisis?” Foreign Affairs. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64862/minxin-pei/will-the-chinese-communist-party-survive-the-crisis)It might seem reasonable to expect that challenges from the disaffected urban middle class, frustrated college graduates, and unemployed migrants will constitute the principal threat to the party's rule. If those groups were in fact to band together in a powerful coalition, then the world's longest-ruling party would indeed be in deep trouble. But that is not going to happen. Such a revolutionary scenario overlooks two critical forces blocking political change in China and similar

authoritarian political systems: the regime's capacity for repression and the unity among the elite.

Economic crisis and social unrest may make it tougher for the CCP to govern, but they will not loosen the party's hold on power. A glance at countries such as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, and Burma shows that a relatively unified elite in control of the military and police can cling to power through brutal force, even in the face of abysmal economic failure . Disunity within the ruling elite,

on the other hand, weakens the regime's repressive capacity and usually spells the rulers' doom. The CCP has already demonstrated its remarkable ability to contain and suppress chronic social protest and small-scale dissident movements. The regime maintains the People's Armed Police, a well-trained and well-

equipped anti-riot force of 250,000. In addition, China's secret police are among the most capable in the world and are augmented by a vast network of informers. And although the Internet may have made control of information more

difficult, Chinese censors can still react quickly and thoroughly to end the dissemination of dangerous news. Since the Tiananmen crackdown, the Chinese government has greatly refined its repressive capabilities. Responding to tens of thousands of riots each year has made Chinese law enforcement the most experienced in the world at crowd control and dispersion. Chinese state security services have applied the tactic of "political decapitation" to great effect, quickly arresting protest leaders and leaving their followers disorganized, demoralized, and impotent. If worsening economic conditions lead to a potentially explosive political situation, the party will stick to these tried-and-true practices to ward off any organized movement against the regime.

AT Cyber Security – No Cooperation

Xi won’t cooperate on cyber measuresSacks 2015 – China Analyst, Eurasia Group (Samm, Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: Regulatory Barriers to Digital Trade in China, and Costs to US Firms http://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Sacks%20Testimony_1.pdf)These latest developments reflect the growing influence of hardliners on China’s industrial and foreign technology policies. Within the Chinese bureaucracy, proponents of greater data localization, import substitution, sovereignty in cyberspace, and encryption access are exerting increasing influence over the policy agenda. Hardline policies on these issues are not new to Chinese policy landscape and have in the past been walked back by Beijing—for example in 2007 the Ministry of Public Security introduced a “Multi-Level Protection Scheme” prohibiting foreign companies from supplying core products for government, banks, and other critical infrastructure companies; a 2010

“Compulsory Certification for Information Security Scheme” required foreign companies to submit security product IP to the government. But

what is different now is that direction is coming from the highest levels in the Chinese

system under the direction of President Xi himself. The Central Leading Small Group for Network Security and Informatization set up in February 2014 and chaired by President Xi is emerging as one of the most powerful elements within the bureaucracy and will consolidate the leadership’s power to push forward national policies. Contrary to popular perception, China's cyber policy environment had been fragmented among military, civilian, industrial, and other state actors at both regional and central levels, leading to gridlock and inconsistent implementation. This group is more powerful than its equivalent under the Hu administration. Xi himself is the chair while the earlier group was chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao. Elevating the group from the State Council level to the Party level will enable better coordination among the State Council,

National People’s Congress, and the People’s Liberation Army. Overall the make-up of the group suggests that development of the internet has become a focal point across the industrial, financial, and telecom space. Inclusion of departments such as the National Development and Reform Commission, People’s Bank of China, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology mean that there is support for boosting internet technologies across all areas of the bureaucracy. Of the 22 members of the

group (President Xi and Premier Li Keqiang are the two top officials), roughly half have a status as the most senior rank among Party, military, and government officials.

AT Cyber Security – No War

US-China cyber war won’t happenLindsay 15 – assistant research scientist at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies(Jon, “The Impact of China on Cybersecurity: Fiction and Friction,” International Security, 39.3)Exaggerated fears about the paralysis of digital infrastructure and growing concerns over competitive advantage exacerbate the spiral of mistrust. Closer consideration of domestic factors within China and China's strategic interaction with the United States reveals a more complicated yet less worrisome situation . This article

argues that for every type of purported Chinese cyber threat, there are also serious Chinese vulnerabilities and Western strengths that reinforce the political status quo. Cyberwar between the United States and China, much like U.S.-China conventional war, is highly unlikely . Nevertheless, the

economically driven proliferation of information technology enables numerous instances of friction to emerge below the threshold of violence. From a technical perspective, cyber operations are often thought to be inexpensive and effective, but there are underappreciated institutional costs involved in their employment. Moreover, even if actors can overcome the

operational barriers associated with ambitious cyber penetrations, they still have incentives to moderate the intensity of their exploitation in order to preserve the benefits that make exploitation worthwhile in the first place. This logic culminates in a relentlessly irritating but indefinite ly tolerable

stability in the cyber domain . China and the United States can look forward to chronic and ambiguous intelligence-counterintelligence contests across their networks, even as the internet facilitates productive exchange between them.

Cyber-attackers won’t escalate to avoid retaliationLindsay 15 – assistant research scientist at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies(Jon, “The Impact of China on Cybersecurity: Fiction and Friction,” International Security, 39.3)Barring gross misperception, however, one can expect the risk of unwanted escalation from cyber to other military domains to deter both sides from resorting to more destructive forms of computer network attack in most situations.113 Yet although nuclear or conventional deterrence might be able to check catastrophic cyberattack, it cannot credibly discourage minor cyber aggression such as nationalist hacktivism, industrial espionage, or harassment of dissident expatriates. Indeed, the observable pattern of Chinese (and American) cyber activity conforms to the logic of the Cold War stability-instability paradox, but in slightly revised form. In the original formulation of the paradox, mutual vulnerability to nuclear retaliation inhibits nuclear war but encourages conventional war in peripheral

theaters where nuclear threats are not credible.114 Today, the intensity of cyber aggression is bounded by the risk of any form of military retaliation as well as the need to preserve interconnection and protect sources and methods that rely on deception. Cyberattackers intentionally keep the costs they inflict below the assessed threshold of even limited military retaliation by opponents, occupying a region where military threats of punishment would be utterly noncredible. The aggressor's freedom of action is further constrained by the need to maintain stealth and plausible deniability for ongoing operations. Actors that are deterred by threats of military punishment , on the

one hand, and threats of counterintelligence detection or loss of connection, on the other, are encouraged

to find more limited ways to inflict costs. The complexity of modern computer network infrastructure, in particular, offers many inexpensive ways to inflict minor costs. One implication is that cyberspace creates more scope for nontraditional security concerns (e.g., harassment of human rights organizations and vulnerable user communities) that powerful actors usually ignore in their focus on protecting high-value economic and military assets.115

Containment DA

Link – Weakens Containment/Erodes Pressure

The BIT uniquely undermines containments – it erodes our leverage to pressure ChinaMichael Wessel, 9/24/15, Politico, “why the US should be wary of Chinese money,” http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/xi-jinping-chinese-investment-213185, mm

Republicans are criticizing President Obama for his willingness to roll out the red carpet for President Xi Jinping of China. They find the planned 21-gun salute for the Chinese leader unbecoming. I’m less concerned with the form of the greeting than the nature of the discussions.¶ Amidst the pomp and circumstance of the state dinner, there is likely to be a conversation about cyber intrusions emanating from China, president Obama is expected to call for a measured course in the South China Sea and the latest devaluation of the Chinese currency will apparently come up. But more worrisome than any of these points of tension between the United States and China is an issue where the two countries’

governments largely agree: trade.¶ What should truly concern Americans is the U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), a secretive agreement likely in the final stages of drafting with the potential to lock in place America’s unequal and imbalanced economic relationship with China. We’ve been importing

hundreds of billions of dollars more in goods from China than we send to them. Now, we may be setting the stage to import their non-market economic principles and let them potentially undermine more and more of

our free market system.¶ I’m an original and continuing member of the Commission of the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission, which is instructed to “monitor, investigate and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the U.S. and China.” I also serve as a cleared liaison to two statutory trade advisory committees and am supposed to have access to U.S. proposals and negotiating text. But, so far, my colleagues and I have been denied the ability to review the offers made during the BIT negotiations that will determine what economic sectors are covered by the treaty. And the basic provisions we do know about aren’t appropriate for China, which has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted to follow trade rules.¶ After the financial crisis, the Council of Economic Advisors made clear that the United States welcomed foreign investment with open arms. Indeed, the “Select USA” program has been working aggressively to bring in foreign investors. Much of that investment can provide good jobs with good wages. The investments are transparent and many of them come from market-oriented businesses whose stocks are traded on public exchanges. China is an exception.¶ Chinese investments in the United States over a certain dollar threshold must still be approved by a minimum of one, and up to three Chinese governmental entities. So, by definition, large Chinese investments in the U.S. must fulfill governmental objectives. That’s not free-market principles at work.¶ To take just one example, let’s look at China’s purchase of Smithfield Foods a short time ago. This past weekend, former Treasury Secretary Paulson applauded the purchase and the resulting 45 percent increase in U.S. pork exports to China that resulted. He’s got it wrong. For years, U.S. pork producers had been trying to get their products into the hands of Chinese consumers. It was only after our leading company was purchased that exports—for that company’s products—increased. Under real free market conditions, we would have been able to export our high quality pork without China having to purchase one of America’s great companies.¶ This raises an important question: Is more investment by Chinese companies, who are primarily guided by non-market economic principles and often receive support from the state, really in our interest? What will their sourcing patterns be? Will a company that makes steel pipe and tube use domestically produced raw materials and suppliers or will they seek to employ the workers in their home market? As Smithfield Foods may no longer be subject to same profit pressures as other producers, have other companies had to engage in cost-cutting measures to compete against it? If so, what has been the impact of those cuts on pig farmers, feed grain producers and other suppliers?¶ As a commissioner, I’ve spent a good bit of time and energy trying to locate business case studies analyzing Chinese-invested firms here in the United States that were done by acknowledged experts with free access to the management, the workers and the books of those companies. And, as important, where the study wasn’t paid for by the firm being studied. So far, those kind of honest studies don’t appear to have been done.¶ China continues to build its industries far beyond its domestic demand. Rising overcapacity, in sector after sector, fueled by government subsidies and policies, has devastated producers in the United States and other markets who have had to compete against these products. From steel to aluminum to glass to solar to paper to many other industries, China has continued to keep capacity online, or add to it, despite global overcapacity and relatively stagnant or declining demand.¶ The result has been decreasing profits for too many U.S. firms, countless lost jobs and a flood of imports that are not governed by the need to make a profit for their companies. Trade cases have been filed against China in product after product area, but every time China loses a case it simply shifts strategies to subsidize and dump other products. Overcapacity has been raised during numerous Strategic and Economic Dialogue talks with the Chinese. But the problem is only getting worse.¶ The Chinese

Communist Party’s power, in part, rests on ensuring an adequate level of domestic growth to keep its people employed and its industries humming along. So China isn’t interested in taking capacity offline and putting its people out of work.¶ In a recent trip to Beijing, my first in 18 years, a Chinese economic official lectured me about the benefits of the U.S.-China relationship. I responded that, rather than buy our pork, they bought our leading company. And, while we appreciated their purchase of U.S. soybeans, they have refused to buy soybeans that have been crushed to extract the oil and the soybean meal. That process leads to many more jobs—good paying jobs—and domestic wealth creation. But China wants to save those jobs for its own people.¶ Later on, a military official, in response to a question about Chinese cyber attacks, argued that these weren’t attacks—they were acts of espionage. All countries engage in such practices, he suggested. It’s true that every nation spies for national security reasons. But China’s intelligence services go much further by stealing economic secrets from private companies. China not only shares what it learns with its own companies, it takes requests from those companies. In May of 2014, U.S. attorney David Hickton succeeded in obtaining an indictment against five People’s Liberation Army hackers who took requests, obtained information by hacking and then gave the information to the requesting parties.¶ Unfortunately, China hasn’t stopped. Indeed, as FBI Director James Comey said, “there are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who’ve been hacked by the Chinese and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked by the Chinese.” The Administration needs to take action to make clear that there are real costs if China continues these actions.¶ From the BIT to economic espionage to overcapacity China’s playing by a different set of rules. By now, we should have learned that further trade deals and investment treaties will only lead to more outsourcing of production and loss of jobs. China’s playing to

win and so should the United States . When China understands that the U.S. will stand up when

they don’t open up their markets and that we will respond forcefully to rule breaking and upsetting

international norms, we may be able to manage our differences . Until then we should stop hoping that China wants to be more like us.

Politics

Link – Plan Unpopular

Passing the BIT triggers a political firestormDavid Dayen, 3/18/16, The American Prospect, “The job-killing trade deal you’ve never heard of: the china bilateral investment treaty,” http://prospect.org/article/job-killing-trade-deal-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-china-bilateral-investment-treaty, mm

Wrapping up the BIT negotiations, however, would trigger a political explosion . Given that the leading Republican candidate assails trade deals with China in every public address, tossing another U.S./China treaty into the mix would fan an already volatile political fire. Like other

treaties, the BIT would require a two-thirds vote for Senate ratification. That would be a difficult lift in a year with a record Chinese trade deficit and high anxiety over the downsides of globalization.

The plan would be unpopular – ratification requires a heavy lift in CongressC. Fred Bergsten, February 2015, Peterson Institute for International Economics, “toward a US-China investment treaty,” https://piie.com/publications/briefings/piieb15-1.pdf, mm

A unique feature of a BIT in US domestic politics could amplify these uncertainties. If the BIT is concluded¶ as a treaty, as is typically the case, it would require congressional ratification via a two-thirds vote of the¶ Senate (as opposed to the simple majority, albeit of both House and Senate, that must approve an FTA).

Such¶ a majority is difficult to achieve in the Senate on any issue at this point in time. Even if the US-China

negotiations¶ are successful, the BIT ultimately faces an important hurdle within the US political process; hence there¶ has been talk of converting the BIT into a “bilateral investment agreement,” which would be treated like an¶ FTA in Congress, on the grounds that the House would have keen interests in some of the deal’s more far-ranging¶ components, but such an effort is unlikely to survive the Rules Committees and is thus unlikely to succeed.

Link – (Trades off w/TPP)

BIT triggers a political firestorm – that kills support for the TPPDavid Dayen, 3/18/16, The American Prospect, “The job-killing trade deal you’ve never heard of: the china bilateral investment treaty,” http://prospect.org/article/job-killing-trade-deal-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-china-bilateral-investment-treaty, mm

Wrapping up the BIT negotiations, however, would trigger a political explosion . Given that the leading Republican candidate assails trade deals with China in every public address, tossing another U.S./China treaty into the mix would fan an already volatile political fire. Like other

treaties, the BIT would require a two-thirds vote for Senate ratification. That would be a difficult lift in a year with a record Chinese trade deficit and high anxiety over the downsides of globalization.¶ The BIT’s presence also undermines the geopolitical case for TPP, since one of the main arguments for that treaty is that it’s needed to “contain” China. “If you’re saying TPP is for strategic reasons and doing this at the same time and not telling us anything about it, what are we to expect?” asks Lynn of New America. “We have to assume it’s a giveaway, and we have to assume your claims about TPP are bogus.”

Politics – Obama Involved/Drains PC

A BIT push requires Obama’s involvement – it will suck up his political capitalShaun Donnelly 9/15/15 (Vice President, U.S. Council for International Business, “Bit By Bit Won’t Get It Done On The U.S. - China BIT Negotiations”)When Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Washington later this month for what may well be the final full-blown U.S.-China summit of the Obama Administration, there will be a lot of important bilateral and global issues on the agenda - cyber security, South China Sea, democracy and human rights, climate change, internet freedom, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and a whole lot more. But I want to make a strong plea that the U.S. and Chinese governments also use this upcoming summit to push for real breakthroughs on the long-running U.S.-China negotiations on a bilateral Investment treaty – the “U.S.-China BIT.” The U.S.-China BIT has the potential to be a win-win agreement to provide broad legal protections, market-opening, and dispute settlement mechanisms for foreign direct investment (FDI) flows in both directions. China already has over 100 BITs with other nations, so current and potential U.S. investors are presently at a disadvantage in competing for investment opportunities in China’s fast-growing economy. And make no mistake, this is not a one-way street; Chinese investors are already investing, and looking to invest more, in the U.S., which we should welcome to help increase investment, jobs and economic growth here at home. The U.S.-China BIT negotiations have been with us quite a long time. Since starting back in 2008, late in the Bush 43 Administration, and pre-dating the Obama Administration, the two sides have held 20 formal negotiating rounds. A lot of progress has been made and the two sides are working hard on a very ambitious BIT text, one that would go beyond what China has agreed to with other investment partner nations in at least two important fundamental areas. China has committed at the highest levels to negotiate a comprehensive, high-standard BIT with the U.S., including significant market opening commitments and on a “negative list” basis – investment negotiator jargon for a presumption of openness to foreign investment unless explicitly restricted. These pro-investment pillars have long been fundamental to U.S. BITs around the world and are strongly supported by U.S. business, including by the U.S. Council for International Business and our member companies. We will only support BITs with these types of provisions, and the U.S.-China BIT has long been at the top our list of investment priorities. Understandably, one implication of

such an ambitious BIT negotiation is that it takes time, especially given that this pro-investment conceptual framework is revolutionary to China, where the government still plays a predominant role in the economy, and presumptions of openness face a skeptical bureaucracy and political establishment. Accordingly, the negotiations have advanced slowly – seven years is a long

time to be negotiating. My personal sense as an outside observer is that the professional negotiators on both sides have done excellent work to get these negotiations as far as they have. However, I am not sure that the deal can get done at the negotiator level. I worry that if we fail to see dramatic breakthroughs at and around the Presidential summit this month, we will simply run out of time to get it done during the Obama Administration and will then face further delays on the U.S. side as a new U.S. Administration settles in, reviews existing policies and negotiations, and so on. For me, the bottom line is that we need to see real progress on the U.S.-China BIT this month. The two Presidents will probably need to get involved and provide a strong push to their negotiating teams to get the deal done this year. However, it can’t be just any deal; I am not arguing for speed over substance. A U.S.-China BIT is still only worth doing if it is comprehensive, ambitious, and market-opening. I think the negotiators on both sides have the ability to get that kind of deal done, but they are going need a strong push from the top – the time for that push is

at the late September Obama-Xi Summit. USCIB and others in the business community are certainly ready to do our part in supporting a strong BIT deal with China, including building support in the U.S. Senate for BIT ratification. At this point, however, it is really a time for the two

governments at the highest levels to step up and provide the political impetus to get the

deal done .

Elections

Link

The BIT gives the Trump campaign fuel to win the election – voters are scared of China, worried about globalization and ruins the economy Dayen 4/18DAVID DAYEN. MARCH 18, 2016. The Job-Killing Trade Deal You’ve Never Heard Of: The China Bilateral Investment Treaty. David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon.com who also writes for The Intercept, The New Republic, and The Fiscal Times. http://prospect.org/article/job-killing-trade-deal-you%E2%80%99ve-never-heard-china-bilateral-investment-treatyWrapping up the BIT negotiations, however, would trigger a political explosion. Given that the leading Republican candidate assails trade deals with China in every public address, tossing another U.S./China treaty into the mix would fan an already volatile political fire. Like other

treaties, the BIT would require a two-thirds vote for Senate ratification. That would be a difficult lift in a year with a record Chinese trade deficit and high anxiety over the downsides of globalization. The BIT’s presence also undermines the geopolitical case for TPP, since one of the main arguments for that treaty is that it’s needed to “contain” China. “If you’re saying TPP is for strategic reasons and doing this at the same time and not telling us anything about it, what are we to expect?” asks Lynn of New America. “We have to assume it’s a giveaway, and we have to assume your claims about TPP are bogus.” China has ignored many of the commitments imposed on it following its entry into the World Trade Organization, and critics fear the Chinese would not live up to their obligations on the BIT either. And even amid the secrecy surrounding the deal, many question the value of letting China invest more in the United States, or letting U.S. corporations

escape domestic laws and regulations, effectively turning capitalism into a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game. Investment rules acceptable to corporate executives aren’t necessarily good for workers. And pushing another deal that accelerates the hollowing out of the nation’s industrial base, in an election year, borders on political insanity.