Trump’s tariffs fuel China’s dream of railway link with Southeast Asia

During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s trip to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, intraregional rail transport was at the top of the agenda

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Chinese President Xi Jinping and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim have agreed to boost rail transport and infrastructure cooperation at their talks in Putrajaya this week. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 4:28pm, 17 Apr 2025Updated: 5:21pm, 17 Apr 2025

Dang Phuc Nguyen hopes more Vietnamese bananas, durian and dragonfruit will soon be delivered to China at faster speeds before they spoil and it is indirectly thanks to US President Donald Trump, who has shredded all previous assumptions for global trade and sparked expectations of a surge in intraregional exports.

But Trump’s tariffs were not the issue for Vietnamese fruit farmers, who sold only around 5 per cent of their produce to the US, said Nguyen, the secretary general of the country’s fruit association (Vinafruit). Instead, it is a lack of cold-chain infrastructure to get more fruits into China, the farmers’ biggest market, before they go bad.

Washington’s protectionist tariffs have injected urgency into China-driven ambitions to connect railways and ports from northern Vietnam to China.

Such an upgrade in the transport infrastructure would help speed up the time to get Vietnam’s fresh fruits to Chinese supermarket shelves, Nguyen said.

“Our railways and roads are not well connected; our ports are being developed,” Nguyen told This Week in Asia.

“The proposed railroad projects open up many possibilities. If Vietnam can meet the quality standards of China’s market, we have the potential to dominate it,” he said, particularly durians.