eventually lead to political liberalization to a government more akin to the then recently repatriated Hong Kong Special Administrative Region under One country, two systems. Trans-Pacific Partnership In part, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), geopolitically was thought by some to likely bring China's neighbours closer to the United States and reduce its economic leverage and dependence on Chinese trade. If ratified, the TPP would have strengthened American influence on future rules for the global economy. US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter claimed the passage of the TPP to be as valuable to the United States as the creation of another aircraft carrier. President Barack Obama has argued "if we don't pass this agreement—if America doesn't write those rules—then countries like China will". On January 23, 2017, the newly elected President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trade War In what would become the China–United States trade war, President Donald Trump began setting tariffs and other trade barriers on China in 2018 with the goal of forcing it to make changes to what the U.S. says are "unfair trade practices". The US says those trade practices and their effects are the growing trade deficit, the theft of intellectual property and the forced transfer of American technology to China. Jeff Spross, an economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com, commented that China is pursuing economic development much in the same way as many other modern industrialized economies before it, except in a world where the rules of the global free trade order are enforced by institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, ensuring economic development is driven by private investors. At the Bretton Woods Conference, the US representative, Harry Dexter White, insisted that the world reserve currency be the United States dollar instead of a proposed new international unit of currency and that the IMF and World Bank be under the purview of the United States. The Reagan administration and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and Donald Trump as a private citizen, made identical claims in the 1980s when Japan was undergoing its economic miracle which led Japan to signing the Plaza Accord. Like the TPP, it has been argued that the trade war is simply a more direct attempt to stifle China's development and is indicative of a shift in the US public perception of China as a "rival nation to