Richard McGregor, Columnist

China’s Doghouse Is Smaller Than It Looks

But South Korea, Canada and Australia are learning that countries who fall in can’t easily get out.

April 5, 2019 at 12:00 AM UTC

Updated on

April 5, 2019 at 4:59 AM UTC

Richard McGregor is a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. He has been the bureau chief for the Financial Times in Beijing, Shanghai and Washington, and is the author most recently of "Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century".

Troubled waters for canola oil.
Photographer: Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg

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All eyes in the trade world are fixed on the U.S. and China, with the world’s two largest economies locked in negotiations that could shape the contours of global commerce into the next decade.

The issues on the table – technology transfer, intellectual property, cloud computing and the push by the U.S. to gain a bigger foothold for their financial and high-tech service industries – encompass the big battlefields of the 21st century economy. But a more telling look at the future of world trade might be found elsewhere, in disputes involving mundane commodities currently besetting Australia and Canada.