By Bob Davis 

BEIJING--China wants to use a November international summit to start to put in place a new free-trade zone among Pacific rim countries, despite the objections of the U.S., Japan and others that such a move could delay other Asia-Pacific trade deals already being negotiated.

The fight over what's known as the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific dominated a weekend meeting in Qingdao, China, of trade ministers from the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, who agreed Sunday to move ahead slowly on the idea after a long night of negotiations.

"We're as keen as China to give it a push," Australia Trade Minister Andrew Robb said of the Beijing proposed plan. "APEC is a powerful forum; if you get all the nations there to agree, others will agree too."

Beijing came into the weekend session looking for an endorsement of the new trade zone, known as the FTAAP, by 2025 and for backing for a "feasibility study"--trade lingo for the analytic work done before the launch of a new round of trade talks, said trade ministers. They didn't get either, but they came away with enough to claim something of a victory.

APEC, which works by consensus, agreed to put in place a working group, chaired by the U.S. and China to "kick off and advance the process in a comprehensive and systematic manner toward the eventual realization of an FTAAP," according to the group's communiqué. Mr. Robb said the group would do much the same work as a feasibility study.

China's Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng said in a statement that the meeting would "lay a solid foundation for promoting the ultimate realization of the Asia-Pacific free trade zone." U.S. officials, interviewed over the weekend, said regional trade deals now being negotiated needed to take priority over a new round of negotiations. Ultimately FTAAP could be built on the foundation of such trade deals, U.S. officials said.

FTAAP is important to China for several reasons, said trade officials. APEC leaders will gather in Beijing in November for the first major international summit in China since Xi Jinping assumed power, and Chinese officials want to demonstrate they can show global leadership. The proposed trade deal is also part of competition with the U.S. over which nation will dominate trade policy over the coming decades in Asia. The U.S. is leading separate regional trade talks that so far don't include China, and China is involved in talks that exclude the U.S.

"China has this year said they'd like the FTAAP to be one of the big headlines," said Alan Bollard, executive director of APEC. "The idea has been talked about since 2010. China wants to make it more concrete and more specific." APEC officials have talked generally about free trade in the region since the group started holding leaders' meetings in 1993--with U.S. officials often doing the pushing. Such ideas have gotten nowhere.

Now the U.S. is focusing on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal between 12 Pacific rim countries that would cut tariffs, open up agricultural trade, strengthen intellectual property protection and set standards for state-owned industries. China isn't a member of TPP talks, which have foundered, in part, over the breadth of the undertaking. The APEC ministers who are also involved in TPP jetted from Qingdao to Singapore on Sunday to continue TPP discussions there. The U.S. hopes that the TPP would set the standards for Asia trade--and ultimately for China as well.

China, on the other hand, is part of negotiations between 16 Asian nations to create what's called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which even negotiators acknowledge is less ambitious and less further along than TPP. Layering an Asia Pacific trade deal on top of RCEP could give China different ways to influence trade policy in the Pacific and blunt the U.S. objective of having TPP set the trade policy standards.

"There's a contest between U.S. and China to see who leads" on regional trade liberalization, said Tim Groser, trade minister for New Zealand, which is a part of both the RCEP and TPP deals. "We'll wait and see who has the wherewithal to put deals together and marshal forces to get them enacted. We're not putting all our eggs in the TPP basket."

At the APEC session, the U.S. managed to slow the Chinese effort. Negotiators from both nations worked late Saturday night and into Sunday to craft language that both could live with. The two sides ditched the goal of 2025 for now and scrapped talk of a "feasibility study." U.S. officials felt that creating the working group would help make the new free trade talks secondary to the completion of TPP.

"As the [APEC] leaders recognized back in 2010, the pathways toward an FTAAP lie outside APEC, in TPP, RCEP and other negotiating forums," said U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman in a statement.

Mr. Froman had another bone to pick with China during the weekend session--trying to get Beijing to sign on to an updated version of the Information Technology agreement which eliminates tariffs on high-tech goods. China hasn't been willing to agree that certain semiconductors, medical equipment and other high-tech goods should be tariff-free, in part, because it is looking to build up domestic industries in those areas--to the frustration of the U.S. and other of China's trading partners. Malaysia Trade Minister Mustapa Mohamed said "negotiations have not progressed much" and urged "key players" to "move away from their entrenched positions."

Mr. Froman said in a statement that "the United States came to China with new ideas for how to press the negotiations forward," though he didn't name them. Mr. Robb, the Australian trade minister, said that the two sides would look again at two dozen items that China has balked at making tariff free and convene later in the summer to see if they had made progress.

Write to Bob Davis at Bob.Davis@wsj.com