China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and his subordinates are mounting a diplomatic full court press to try to persuade other countries not to cave to pressure from the Trump administration on tariffs, hoping to show that China will not be isolated in the trade war.
In recent days, China’s commerce minister has held a video call with the European Union’s top trade official, pushing for closer cooperation. Chinese diplomats have been contacting officials in Tokyo and Seoul. And Mr. Xi landed in Vietnam and Malaysia on state visits this week where he was greeted with carefully choreographed crowds of supporters.
At stake for Mr. Xi are the fate of the global trading system that propelled China’s rise as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, as well as access to markets for many Chinese exports now that the United States has sought to cut them off with debilitating tariffs.
The outreach is also a test of China’s status as a global power in the face of what Beijing sees as an effort by Washington to contain and suppress its key rival. China has fought back against the Trump administration with its own eye-watering tariffs on U.S. goods, as well as restrictions on the export of some rare earth minerals and magnets that are vital for assembling cars, missiles and drones.
To that end, Mr. Xi has tried to assemble a broader coalition to his side — hoping to keep countries from slapping tariffs of their own on Chinese products, or giving in to Washington’s demands to decouple from Chinese manufacturing.
During his travels in Southeast Asia this week, he has depicted China as a leading defender of the global order and indirectly cast the United States as an unreliable player. In Hanoi, he urged Vietnam to join China in opposing “unilateral bullying.” In Kuala Lumpur, he urged Southeast Asian nations to also “reject decoupling, supply disruption,” and “tariff abuse.”
“Chinese officials have quietly conveyed that the way the U.S. treats its longstanding allies and partners in Europe is a sign of what’s to come for Southeast Asia,” said Lynn Kuok, the Lee Kuan Yew Chair at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “With Trump’s steep, sweeping tariffs across the region, that message needs no reinforcement.”
But Mr. Xi’s attempts at presenting China as a paragon of free trade and a champion of the rules-based international order ignores years of Beijing’s own coercive economic behavior and generous subsidies for select industries that have often alienated the country’s trading partners and neighbors. It partly explains why the world’s eroding trust in Washington has not immediately led to newfound alignment with Beijing — that, along with the risk of retribution from Mr. Trump for siding with China.
Already, the European Union, Japan and South Korea have pushed back at attempts by China to suggest that they had agreed with China to jointly fight back against Mr. Trump’s tariffs. European Union officials have instead emphasized their concerns about the dumping of Chinese goods in their market. Last week, Australia rejected a call by China’s ambassador, Xiao Qian, to “join hands” in rebuffing the Trump administration.
These reactions to China’s entreaties show that “Beijing is not filling the vacuum of trust left by the U.S., just offering immediate relief from the shock therapy the Trump administration has forced upon the world,” said Rorry Daniels, the managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.
Mr. Xi’s long-planned trip to Vietnam this week, followed by a visit to Malaysia before a stop in Cambodia, has taken on more urgency for China now that President Trump is using his 90-day pause on his “Liberation Day” tariff hikes to press countries to negotiate trade deals with the United States. Mr. Trump, too, has shown urgency by inserting himself into trade negotiations on Wednesday with Japanese officials visiting Washington.
Beijing’s fear, analysts say, is that these deals will isolate China by including agreements that choke off Chinese exports. That could be through coordinated tariffs, or a crackdown on Chinese companies transshipping their goods through third countries like Vietnam to obscure their true origin, or by targeting Chinese raw materials in exports headed to the United States.
Vietnam lavished Mr. Xi with the rare honor of being greeted by a Vietnamese president on the airport tarmac when he arrived in the country on Monday. But Hanoi resisted agreeing with Mr. Xi’s boldest comments condemning protectionism, and ultimately signed onto a vague joint statement opposing “hegemonism and power politics” — an accusation that many in Vietnam assign to China during territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
For Vietnam, the threat of a 46 percent U.S. levy prompted teams of negotiators to head to Washington to make an appeal for lower tariffs. In a concession to Mr. Trump, the Vietnamese government this week promised to crack down on trade fraud — widely seen as a reference to companies shipping Chinese products through Vietnam to evade U.S. tariffs.
Still, Mr. Trump kept the pressure on Hanoi, telling reporters on Monday that Mr. Xi’s meeting with Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, was probably focused on how to “screw” America.
“Hanoi is being careful not to signal a tilt too far toward Beijing, especially in areas that could displease the Trump administration,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Ultimately, Hanoi is still hedging between the world’s two great powers. But as the geopolitical climate hardens, the space to do so is rapidly shrinking.”
Vietnam risks retaliation from its much bigger neighbor if Beijing determines that Hanoi is trying to curry favor with the Trump administration at China’s expense.
China placed tariffs of up to 100 percent on canola, pork and other foods from Canada last month in a clear warning to countries not to cooperate with Washington on trade.
To Beijing, if trading partners “pander to the United States, they will hurt China and at the same time, they will hurt their own country as well,” said Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar.
That threat was reinforced on Sunday by Yuyuan Tantian, a blog affiliated with China’s state broadcaster, CCTV. China would not comment on talks between other countries and the United States, the post said. “But if anyone uses China’s interests as a token of allegiance to the United States, China will never agree!”
The warning underscores how Beijing has been both courting and confronting its neighbors as President Trump has been recalibrating Washington’s place in the world. Mr. Xi’s expression of “deep friendship” with Vietnam during his visit came not long after China held live-fire drills in the Gulf of Tonkin to reassert its territorial claims in those waters over Hanoi.
Even if China fails to build a united front against the Trump administration’s tariffs, it would still benefit from making other countries think twice about aligning their trade policies with the United States, said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who formerly worked in the Central Intelligence Agency and studies Chinese politics.
“Xi doesn’t necessarily need these countries to choose Beijing,” Mr. Czin said. “He just needs to prevent them from choosing Washington. That is part of why China’s ‘charm offensive’ has so far had such a dearth of charm.”
Tung Ngo in Danang, Choe Sang-Hun in Seoul, Martin Fackler in Tokyo and Berry Wang in Hong Kong contributed reporting.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world.
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