Chinese President Xi Jinping has arrived in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, his final stop on a three-country trip to Southeast Asia. Eric Olander, co-founder of China-Global South Project, tells TaiwanPlus that Xi wants to present China as a geopolitical alternative to the U.S.
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00:00What is Xi Jinping aiming to achieve with this trip to Southeast Asia?
00:04Xi is trying to present himself and China as a stable, reliable, dependable alternative to
00:10a United States that in many ways is seen in this part of the world increasingly as a belligerent
00:15power. The United States is threatening right now Malaysia with 24% tariffs, 46% tariffs on Vietnam,
00:24and 50% tariffs on Cambodia, three countries that Xi is going to on this visit. That's very,
00:30very scary. And let's not forget that the tariffs right now are only in pause. There's a postponement.
00:36They may come back after the 90-day review that was implemented earlier. So Xi in many ways is
00:42trying to serve as a ballast for these countries in what is now an incredibly turbulent time.
00:47I think for these Southeast Asian countries, they're all in a very difficult spot because
00:51they can't really make a choice between the US and China without exacting huge damage on their
00:59economies. Do you think Southeast Asian countries can ease the US's concerns over Chinese goods being
01:04manufactured in their countries? Donald Trump and White House Senior Trade Advisor Peter Navarro
01:09have made it very clear that they do not want these countries to be backdoors for Chinese companies to
01:14circumvent US tariffs and US sanctions. That is not what's going to happen. And they've made that
01:21abundantly clear. And already we've seen the Vietnamese now start to push back on the Chinese
01:26saying, if you're coming here just to send to the United States, that is going to be a problem.
01:31Anwar Ibrahim very, very early on said Malaysia cannot be a base for circumventing Chinese tariffs.
01:38And he really discouraged that kind of Chinese investment. So they're going to have to be a
01:42little bit more disciplined in terms of what kind of Chinese investment comes into these countries.
01:47If it's to literally get around US sanctions on China and to avoid the 145% tariff, for example,
01:54that is not going to work because the Americans have become very sophisticated now in monitoring
01:59Chinese transshipments. How might China team up with Southeast Asia to soften the blow from US
02:05tariffs? Southeast Asia is a market of 700 million people. It's a fast and up and coming middle class.
02:11It's a good market for China to be in. So when they're building BYD factories in Malaysia and Vietnam and
02:17other places and even in Thailand, part of that is to export to other parts of the world. But a big
02:21part of that is to sell to consumers in these markets. So that's number one. Number two is this
02:27is not uniquely a Southeast Asian phenomenon. The Chinese are building BYD factories in Turkey.
02:34They're building them in Africa. They're building them in Latin America. They're building factories and
02:39supply chains outside of China in lots of different verticals and sectors. So Southeast Asia is by far
02:46the most important for China because contrary to the rhetoric that we're seeing in the United States
02:51today, where they feel that the United States is the most important trading region for China,
02:56China, that is not true.