China’s Premier, Li Keqiang, has committed to developing the APEC-based FTAAP trade deal as part of the 2018 Government Work Report. The FTAAP has been on the workbench for a long-time, with an initial roadmap set in November 2016. The first big challenge it faces is that the U.S. is part of APEC, and it is unlikely the Trump administration will want to engage in a multilateral deal. There are other challenges due to the deal’s scale and complexity. FTAAP represents $1.1 trillion of Chinese exports, or 48% of the total in 2017. It is also mostly a superset of the RCEP deal which is also ...