CHINA’S efforts to use a leaders’ summit to start negotiations on a free trade zone spanning the Pacific has been blocked by the United States, people close to the matter said, as the world’s two largest economies tussle over influence in the region and billions of dollars in trade, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

    China, the host of this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum next Monday and Tuesday, has sought to highlight its expanding international role by pressing for a pact known as the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP).

    China’s free trade zone has been on the agenda of APEC for years — and was initially pushed by the United States — but has been relegated to the back burner as the United States has poured its efforts into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact it is negotiating with 11 nations that include Japan but not China, the report said.

    For China, the FTAAP would offer a way to ensure that it continues to get preferential access to some of its largest trading partners. A TPP deal would cost China about US$100 billion a year in lost exports as the partners trade more among themselves and less with China, according to an estimate by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington.

    “China wanted to reinvigorate” FTAAP, said Alan Bollard, executive director of APEC, an association of 21 economies including the United States, China, Russia and Japan, whose leaders meet annually and whose decisions are taken by consensus. The APEC leaders’ summit next week will be the first major international conference held in Beijing since President Xi Jinping assumed his post.

    Under U.S. pressure, China dropped two provisions from the draft of an APEC communique to be released at the end of the leaders’ session, negotiators said. The statement no longer calls for an FTAAP “feasibility study” and has no target date to finish the deal. China wanted 2025 as an end date.(SD-Agencies)