Fifteen countries recently signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and formed the world’s largest trade bloc between some of the globe’s largest and fastest-growing economies. Employing a text-as-data analysis, this article systematically compares the text of the RCEP to the previous agreements of its members to determine the sources of language in the RCEP and investigate why particular treaty text is replicated more frequently relative to others. The results indicate that language derived from the multiparty and multicontinental trade agreements of the United States, a state not involved in the RCEP negotiations, accounted for a disproportionate share of the finalized text. These findings highlight the temporal dimension of power asymmetries as well as the importance of treaty design itself in the diffusion of regulatory norms and suggest that specific trade agreements serve as reference points for subsequent agreements.

十五个国家最近签署了区域全面经济伙伴关系协定（RCEP），并在全球一些最大和增长最快的经济体之间形成了世界上最大的贸易集团。本文采用文本即数据分析的方法，系统地将RCEP文本与其成员之前的协议进行比较，以确定RCEP中的语言来源，并调查为什么特定条约文本相对于其他条约文本被更频繁地复制。结果表明，语言源自未参与RCEP的美国的多党和多洲贸易协定谈判，在最终文本中占据了不成比例的份额。这些发现强调了权力不对称的时间维度以及条约设计本身在监管规范传播中的重要性，并表明具体的贸易协定可以作为后续协定的参考点。