EDITORIAL – MAY 2025 – Xi steps into the vacuum

President Xi Jinping threw his long game to the wind last month.

The Chinese president spotted a chance to cut short decades of planning and take strides towardsmaking China the undisputed global superpower.

He headed for Southeast Asia, where much blood has been spilt in that hearts-and-minds tug-of-war between opposing values of democracy and autocracy.

Today’s weapons – so far, at least – are not bullets and bombs but tariffs and trade.

Southeast Asia is a strategic battleground precisely because it is a cocktail of values and systems, a blend of pro-China and pro-America with which several governments are treaty allies.

These nations are glued together not by any one religion or political system but by trade. They are driven by a pragmatism that China is neither good nor evil, but a permanent force that has to be accepted.

America, on the other hand, is a distant power that comes and goes. It is also a democracy, meaning it can turn on and off its taps of goodwill or hostility according to the unpredictable will of its people who know little about the lives of the people in Asia.

All signs, right now, are that the taps are turning off,creating that vacuum into which President Xi is stepping.

His rhetoric, during his tour of Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, reflected not that of those stone-faced Marxist-Leninist leaders of the long-ago communist era. Rather, Xi’s aim was to touch hearts and paint visions of a rosy future, more in the style of a Kennedy or a Reagan.

The Vietnamese media carried a piece with Xi’s byline saying, ‘Our two countries should resolutely safeguard the multilateral trading system.’

For Malaysians, he portrayed himself as the patriarch of an ‘Asian family’ while Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim hailed him as an ‘extraordinary leader’.

Here, with its message of stability and prosperity,China is positioning itself as the neighbourly rock holding together a global rules-based order, while far away America threatens and bullies with tariffs and insults.

A sobering reality is being forged from what is unfolding on the ground. 

Encouraged by the West’s sloganeering about free trade, Southeast nations had set themselves up ascritical links in supply chains.

More recently, they have become safer havens for foreign investors anticipating protracted friction between Washington and Beijing.

Now, abruptly, without any time to plan,these countries are faced with crippling American tariffsthat will shut factories, slow development and shred trust.

Dignity has also been ripped away with the leader of the so-called free world boasting that these weaker nations are ‘calling up and kissing my ass’ to beg for lower tariffs.

The spectre of kow-towing to an all-powerfulemperorwas once the monopoly of China. In a much more vulgar way, the kiss-ass, know-towing has now been adopted by America. 

Xi chose to visit the three Southeast Asian countries hit by the harshest tariffs; Malaysia 24 per cent, Cambodia 49 per cent and 46 per cent for Vietnam, whose exports to the U.S represents 30 per cent of its GDP.

In the tat-for-tat trade war, China’s tariffs went as high as an incredible 245 per cent, making manufacturing for the American markets unviable.

Among Xi’s ‘Asian’ family, China is the only nation with the capacity to stand up to and take action against the US.

In one move, Beijing has stopped buying American soya beans and corn. Instead, it has set up stronger supply lines with countries like Brazil, costing US farmers tens of billions of dollars.

Evidence of Southeast Asia’s strategic importance came towards the end of the month with a similar visit by the Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

Not only was Japan blatantly playing catch-up to China, there was also a hollow ring to its statements about protecting a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific based on the rule-of-law’.

If the economies of so many Southeast Asian nations can be thrown so quickly into so much jeopardy, any rule-of-law emanating from America must surely count for nothing.

The US will struggle to regain the trust it once enjoyed in Asia, regardless of who next comes to the White House.

Without a shot being fired, America is swiftly and unequivocally cedingits Asian power to China.