SOMETIMES CHINA makes shrewd decisions. At other times it is capable of grave mistakes, even acts of wickedness. But the Chinese government is rarely silly. In particular, officials do not stake the prestige of their supreme leader, President Xi Jinping, on a whim. That makes it worth revisiting dismissive foreign reactions to a move that, though dry-looking, is important and revealing.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.On September 16th China formally asked to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), an 11-nation trading block that is home to 500m consumers in Asia and the Americas. Though China’s timing was sudden, the move was predictable. Months ago Mr Xi said China would “favourably consider” applying. His word is law. But many foreign analysts (and in private, some foreign government officials) confidently predict that China will never be admitted.Scepticism is understandable. In the name of market opening and fair competition, the CPTPP’s current members—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam—agree to limit subsidies for large state-owned enterprises (SOEs), permit most cross-border flows of data and outlaw forced labour, among many other promises. If those standards seem hard for China to meet, given its statist, security-obsessed turn in recent years, that is no accident. The CPTPP is the orphaned offspring of an earlier, American-led agreement, the TPP. That was crafted by the Bush and Obama administrations with the aim of making Asia and the Pacific into a bastion …
