China's G20 Leadership by John J. Kirton

Author:John J. Kirton [Kirton, John J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317167419
Google: 5qhTDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30536569
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

Results

At its conclusion, the Brisbane Summit saw a major advance in China’s G20 leadership in several ways. Institutionally, on G20 hosting, the leaders announced that China would host the summit in 2016. This victory was secured over the alternative of rival Japan. It had been resolved bilaterally between the two.

On economic growth — the summit’s planned centrepiece goal and achievement — China led in material terms by offering the domestic policy economic reforms to enable the Brisbane Action Plan to add two percent growth above the current trajectory by 2018, if all of the almost 1,000 individual commitments contained in the plan were kept. Although the individual contributions were never made public, a rough estimate was that China led by contributing the most. Its commitments represented at least 25 percent of the total, with a now recovering and still larger United States offering only 20 percent, followed in turn by India, Japan, Germany and Russia (Triggs 2015). Australian treasurer Joe Hockey revealed shortly after the summit that host Australia’s commitments totalled only an additional 1.2 percent (Uren 2014).

On growth and employment, China secured recognition in the communiqué of its desired principle that such growth must be inclusive and that inequality must be reduced.

On IFI reform, China secured a robust passage on the need to implement the overdue Seoul agreement on IMF voice and vote reforms. The communiqué stated: “The implementation of the 2010 reforms remains our highest priority for the IMF and we urge the United States to ratify them. If this does not happen by year-end, we ask the IMF to build on its existing work and stand ready with options for next steps” (G20 2014b).

China secured support for the WTO and the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations. This was despite Australia’s objective of abandoning this approach in favour of a unilateral, bilateral, regional and plurilateral one. Yet just after the Brisbane Summit, in Canberra, Xi and Abbott announced the conclusion of the negotiations to establish the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, showing China was prepared to use the bilateral route while verbally supporting a multilateral one (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2014b).

On climate change, Chinese-U.S. leadership at APEC on the summit’s eve helped the United States, China and Europe secure a full robust paragraph in the communiqué (Jorgensen and Strube 2014). It ended with the words: “We encourage parties that are ready to communicate their intended nationally determined contributions well in advance of [the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] (by the first quarter of 2015 for those parties ready to do so). We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation, such as the Green Climate Fund” (G20 2014b). At his concluding news conference, Harper, hitherto thought to share Abbott’s skeptical approach to climate change control, announced that Canada would also contribute to the fund. Several weeks after the summit, a reluctant Abbott announced that Australia would contribute too.

On energy, China and the United States also jointly led. The

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