China’s leader courts Southeast Asia as trade war with US mounts

Xi’s weeklong tour of Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia aims to amplify that message. As President Trump’s tariffs send shock waves through the global economy, Xi is both striking back against the United States, and telling the world that he is now the leader to rely on for wealth creation and for nations that feel betrayed by the wild swings of Trump’s “America First” agenda.

The next few days will likely be filled with dramatic, choreographed warmth — dozens of women in traditional Vietnamese dresses waving Chinese flags greeted Xi as he stepped onto the tarmac in Hanoi just before noon. But behind the scenes, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

Vietnam and its neighbors are all trying to appease Trump to get tariffs lowered, which may make them resistant to making bold pro-China pronouncements. The US-China trade war — involving whopping tit-for-tat tariffs and the suspension of critical rare earths exports by China — has also made every country more vulnerable to a global recession, and more confused about where the world order might be heading.

Xi, some analysts said, may be far more anxious than he shows.

“Xi will undoubtedly exude confidence,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund. “But the unpredictable trajectory of China’s relations with the United States and the potential for decoupling of the US and Chinese economies is likely extremely worrisome.”

Asia’s industrialized countries have a lot to lose. Many rose out of poverty alongside China through decades of free trade expansion, and the so-called reciprocal tariffs Trump announced this month slammed Asia harder than just anyone expected.

Vietnam found itself with a 46 percent tariff under calculations that put trade deficits at the center of the equation. For Cambodia, it was 49 percent while Malaysia’s rate was 24 percent.

Even with Trump’s sudden 90-day suspension of the levies, the threat of new taxes that would suppress demand and create new challenges for exporting nations has darkened the mood of the entire region, and made many countries question where to turn for help.

Vietnam is especially intertwined with both China, which is its largest trading partner, and the United States, which has been importing more and more from Vietnam ever since Trump’s first-term tariffs led companies to move production from China to other countries.

Vietnam’s exports to the United States — worth $137 billion in 2024 — and its huge investments from foreign companies seeking to diversify away from China are now both in jeopardy.

“Vietnam is today more vulnerable to both China and the US than ever,” said Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.

In response, Vietnam’s leaders are already trying to do what they have done for years — balance, flatter, and hedge.

Teams of Vietnamese negotiators have gone to Washington to plead for lower tariffs, promising to buy more American products and lower trade barriers. This week, Vietnamese officials also pledged to crack down on the transshipment of Chinese products through Vietnam, which White House officials have described as a major impediment to lower tariffs.

Now Vietnam’s leaders — with a two-day visit by Xi that had been planned before the tariffs, to celebrate 75 years of formal relations — are trying to keep China happy too.

Dozens of deals are expected to be signed during Xi’s visit in an effort by both sides to show that collaboration will continue, regardless of US pressure.

And yet, the quantity (with 40 agreements expected) may obscure their incremental nature. The biggest ticket items known so far include a handful of planes made in China that will be flying tourist routes in Vietnam for the first time this week with a budget airline that has also promised to buy Boeing jets.

Vietnam has also signaled that it agreed to keep moving forward with a proposed railway from the Chinese border to a port outside Hanoi — a major infrastructure project that, if built, would deepen political and economic bonds between Vietnam and China.

Many of the other agreements are expected to be broad and vague rather than specific. Despite bonds of communism, Vietnam’s top leaders have a long history of resisting Chinese projects that would strengthen Beijing’s leverage over Vietnam. Even the railway, which China has been pushing to finance with loans for years, has barely progressed beyond early stages of discussion.

Comments published Monday by To Lam, Vietnam’s top leader, the general secretary of its Communist Party, mostly sought to elevate Vietnam to a higher status, as a special country for China: Its largest trade partner in Southeast Asia and fourth largest trade partner in the world.

Vuving said Lam seemed to be trying to “forge close personal ties with Mr. Xi,” but without offering much in areas of clear tension, such as the South China Sea, where China and Vietnam have competing claims. Lam did not directly mention the issue.

Xi took a different approach, calling for more maritime cooperation “to properly control disagreements at sea.” He described relations between Vietnam and China in broader terms: They were joined in solidarity as members of the wider Global South.

Analysts said the approach reflected China’s broader goal, to use this trip as a way to build bonds with countries not just in Asia but elsewhere, and to bolster Xi’s image as a global statesman.

The reality is that China can only do so much for the economies of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia. Its own economy is struggling with the legacy of a housing bust. The US tariffs and Trump’s zero-sum approach to the world also means major exporters are in competition with one another — with suppliers of everything from phones to clothes hunting all over the planet for demand.

China has said it will seek to spur more domestic consumption, but mostly to help its own manufacturers. Analysts doubt there will be enough Chinese buyers to offset losses from the U.S. market while the trade war paralyzes investment and purchasing power for consumers.

“The tit-for-tat approach by the US and the People’s Republic of China means that there may be less space for middlemen like Southeast Asian economies,” said Ja Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

Countries like Vietnam are stuck, he added, “between a rock and a hard place.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.