Xi Jinping has warned that US protectionism will “lead nowhere” as the Chinese leader embarked on a tour of Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia to strengthen ties with export-reliant south-east Asian economies rattled by Donald Trump’s escalating trade war.
The visit, Xi’s first foreign trip this year, comes days after the US president raised tariffs on Chinese goods to as high as 145 per cent, deepening fears of a decoupling between the world’s two largest economies and triggering a sell-off in global markets.
Ahead of the visit, Xi called for greater co-operation with Vietnam and other developing economies to promote an “equal and orderly multi-polar world”.
“Trade war and tariff war will produce no winner, and protectionism will lead nowhere,” Xi wrote in Vietnamese media, adding that the countries should “resolutely safeguard the multilateral trading system, stable global industrial and supply chains and an open and co-operative international environment”.
Many south-east Asian countries — which have high trade surpluses in goods with the US because of their low-cost exports — were also hit by levies as high as 49 per cent. Global supply chains had moved to the region in recent years, notably to Vietnam, in an effort to diversify from China and avoid US tariffs.
Trump has since announced a 90-day reprieve on some tariffs, but the trade uncertainty has unsettled south-east Asian governments and raised questions about Washington’s commitments to the region, where China is already the largest investor and trading partner of many countries.
Xi’s visit is sending the message that “we are the ones who are trying to defend the current international economic order, we are the ones who are defending the removal of barriers, and that the Chinese market will remain open”, said Dylan Loh, assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
Highlighting the uncertainty, the US on Friday announced that smartphones and some other consumer tech products as well as semiconductors and chipmaking equipment imported from China would be excluded from the steep “reciprocal” tariffs, before Trump on Sunday reversed course and said the exemption was temporary, with a separate tariff regime to be established for the sector.
The Chinese leader’s tour begins on Monday in Vietnam, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and an emerging manufacturing powerhouse. On Tuesday, he heads to Malaysia, this year’s chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Cambodia.
Xi will also try to curry favour with south-east Asian leaders under pressure to crack down on transshipments of Chinese goods through their countries to bypass US tariffs.
Writing in the Financial Times last week, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said: “We will want to hear from countries including Cambodia, Mexico and Vietnam that you will stop allowing China to evade US tariffs by trans-shipping exports through your countries.”
US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent met Vietnam’s deputy prime minister Ho Duc Phoc last week and agreed to start formal trade talks.
Yanmei Xie, an independent analyst on Chinese politics, said as Washington opened trade negotiations with various countries, “one big ask” would be to decouple further from China in exchange for access to the US market.
“The game is on to try to get ‘third’ countries” on side, said Xie.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez met Xi in Beijing on Friday, and EU leaders are planning to travel to China for a summit in late July. Xi told Sánchez he was keen to deepen ties with the European country amid a tough trade war and repeated his warning that the world was “undergoing accelerated changes unseen in a century”.
The US tariffs unveiled this month would have a damaging effect on south-east Asian countries, economists have warned. Vietnam, which faces a 46 per cent rate, would be among the hardest hit, with the US accounting for nearly a third of its exports.
Singaporean bank OCBC lowered its 2025 GDP growth forecast for Vietnam from 6.2 per cent to 5 per cent following the tariff announcement, though Hanoi has maintained its 8 per cent growth target.
Loh said south-east Asian countries would try to “hedge and walk an increasingly thin line” between the rival superpowers. While Vietnam has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the manufacturing shift away from China, its larger neighbour is also its biggest source of new investment projects.
Singapore’s foreign minister said in an interview with the FT last week that the shake-up of the global trade system could prove “very hostile for small nations”, which risked being “squeezed out”.
Beijing has spent years building strong economic and trade relationships in south-east Asia, investing billions of dollars in infrastructure, even as its territorial disputes in the South China Sea have worsened.
James Char, a China expert at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the uncertainty caused by Trump’s trade policies created an opportunity for Beijing to “stake its claims to be a reliable partner for countries in the region”.
But while many developing economies in south-east Asia are increasingly aligned with China, there is widespread trepidation about Beijing’s influence in the region, he added.
“Deep down, most of the south-east Asian countries do have reservations about China’s potential to be a magnanimous great power hegemon,” said Char.
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