The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade deal which includes ASEAN, China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, is quietly making big inroads.

"It helps that the area where RCEP has made most progress—harmonising rules of origin for goods exports—matters a lot to the complex supply chain that runs across the world’s biggest manufacturing hub. The deal, in effect, creates a single market in the intermediate goods that go into final products, helping RCEP to prevent the so-called “noodle-bowl” of dozens of overlapping trade deals that exporters struggle to digest."