ASEAN kicks off summits with China, Gulf states amid US tariff threat
The meeting, in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, is taking place on Tuesday, on the second day of the annual summit of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
It follows separate talks between leaders of the ASEAN and the GCC, which comprises of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, opening the ASEAN-GCC summit, said stronger ties between the two blocs would be key to enhancing interregional collaboration, building resilience and securing sustainable prosperity.
'I believe the ASEAN-GCC partnership has never been more important than it is today, as we navigate an increasingly complex global landscape marked by economic uncertainty and geopolitical challenges,' Anwar said.
Malaysia is the current chair of ASEAN, which also includes Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
In written remarks before the meetings, Anwar said 'a transition in the geopolitical order is underway' and that 'the global trading system is under further strain, with the recent imposition of US unilateral tariffs.'
With protectionism surging, the world is also bearing witness to 'multilateralism breaking apart at the seams', he added.
China's Premier Li Qiang, who arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, will join ASEAN and the GCC in their first such meeting on Tuesday. He met with Anwar on Monday and called for expanded trade and investment ties between Beijing, ASEAN and the GCC.
'At a time when unilateralism and protectionism are on the rise and world economic growth is sluggish,' Li said, China, ASEAN and GCC countries 'should strengthen coordination and cooperation and jointly uphold open regionalism and true multilateralism'.
China is willing to work with Malaysia to 'promote closer economic cooperation among the three parties' and respond to global challenges, Li told Anwar.
ASEAN has maintained a policy of neutrality, engaging both Beijing and Washington, but US President Donald Trump's threats of sweeping tariffs came as a blow.
Six of the bloc's members were among the worst hit, with tariffs between 32 percent and 49 percent.
Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs in April for most of the world, and this month struck a similar deal with key rival China, easing trade war tensions.
Al Jazeera's Rob McBride, reporting from Kuala Lumpur, said ASEAN members are 'very much looking at building ties with other parts of the world, in particular China, but also the Middle East' to strengthen their economic resilience.
'A measure of the importance that the GCC is also placing on this meeting is the delegation that has been sent here and the seniority of its members,' he added. 'The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, is here, and we have crown princes from Kuwait and also Bahrain. We also have a deputy prime minister from Oman.'
Anwar said Monday he had also written to Trump to request an ASEAN-US summit this year, showing 'we observe seriously the spirit of centrality.' However, his Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said Washington had not yet responded.
ASEAN has traditionally served as 'a middleman of sorts' between developed economies like the US and China, said Chong Ja Ian from the National University of Singapore (NUS).
'Given the uncertainty and unpredictability associated with economic relations with the United States, ASEAN member states are looking to diversify,' he told the AFP news agency.
'Facilitating exchanges between the Gulf and People's Republic of China is one aspect of this diversification.'
Malaysia, which opened the bloc's 46th summit on Monday, is the main force behind the initiative, he said.
China, which has suffered the brunt of Trump's tariffs, is also looking to shore up its other markets.
Premier Li's participation is 'both timely and calculated', Khoo Ying Hooi from the University of Malaya told AFP.
'China sees an opportunity here to reinforce its image as a reliable economic partner, especially in the face of Western decoupling efforts.'
Beijing and Washington engaged in an escalating flurry of tit-for-tat levies until a meeting in Switzerland saw an agreement to slash them for 90 days.
Chinese goods still face higher tariffs than most, though.
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Over the past two decades, the posture of the United States towards China has evolved from economic cooperation to outright antagonism. US media outlets and politicians have engaged in persistent anti-China rhetoric, while the US government has imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on China and pursued military build-up close to Chinese territory. Washington wants people to believe that China poses a threat. China's rise indeed threatens US interests, but not in the way the US political elite seeks to frame it. The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world system. Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the 'Global North', depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called 'Global South'. This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. 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Higher wages in China impose a constraint on the profits of Western firms that operate there or that depend on Chinese manufacturing for intermediate parts and other key inputs. The other problem, for the core states, is that the increase in China's wages and prices is reducing its exposure to unequal exchange. During the low-wage era of the 1990s, China's export-to-import ratio with the core was extremely high. In other words, China had to export very large quantities of goods in order to obtain necessary imports. Today, this ratio is much lower, representing a dramatic improvement in China's terms of trade, substantially reducing the core's ability to appropriate value from China. Given all this, capitalists in the core states are now desperate to do something to restore their access to cheap labour and resources. One option – increasingly promoted by the Western business press – is to relocate industrial production to other parts of Asia where wages are cheaper. 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This may imply that, if anything, this currency is now overvalued.' China did eventually permit a devaluation in 2019, when tariffs imposed by the administration of US President Donald Trump increased pressure on the renminbi. But this was a normal response to a change in market conditions, not an attempt to suppress the renminbi below its market rate. The US largely supported the Chinese government in the period when its currency was undervalued, including through loans from the IMF and World Bank. The West turned decisively against China in the mid-2010s, at precisely the moment when the country began to raise its prices and challenge its position as a peripheral supplier of cheap inputs to Western-dominated supply chains. The second element that's driving US hostility towards China is technology. Beijing has used industrial policy to prioritise technological development in strategic sectors over the past decade, and has achieved remarkable progress. It now has the world's largest high-speed rail network, manufactures its own commercial aircraft, leads the world on renewable energy technology and electric vehicles, and enjoys advanced medical technology, smartphone technology, microchip production, artificial intelligence, etc. The tech news coming out of China has been dizzying. These are achievements that we only expect from high-income countries, and China is doing it with almost 80 percent less GDP per capita than the average 'advanced economy'. It is unprecedented. This poses a problem for the core states because one of the main pillars of the imperial arrangement is that they need to maintain a monopoly over necessary technologies like capital goods, medicines, computers, aircraft and so on. This forces the 'Global South' into a position of dependency, so they are forced to export large quantities of their cheapened resources in order to obtain these necessary technologies. This is what sustains the core's net-appropriation through unequal exchange. China's technological development is now breaking Western monopolies, and may give other developing countries alternative suppliers for necessary goods at more affordable prices. This poses a fundamental challenge to the imperial arrangement and unequal exchange. The US has responded by imposing sanctions designed to cripple China's technological development. So far, this has not worked; if anything, it has increased incentives for China to develop sovereign technological capacities. With this weapon mostly neutralised, the US wants to resort to warmongering, the main objective of which would be to destroy China's industrial base, and divert China's investment capital and productive capacities towards defence. The US wants to go to war with China not because China poses some kind of military threat to the American people, but because Chinese development undermines the interests of imperial capital. Western claims about China posing some kind of military threat are pure propaganda. The material facts tell a fundamentally different story. In fact, China's military spending per capita is less than the global average, and 1/10th that of the US alone. Yes, China has a big population, but even in absolute terms, the US-aligned military bloc spends over seven times more on military power than China does. The US controls eight nuclear weapons for every one that China has. China may have the power to prevent the US from imposing its will on it, but it does not have the power to impose its will on the rest of the world in the way that the core states do. The narrative that China poses some kind of military threat is wildly overblown. In fact, the opposite is true. The US has hundreds of military bases and facilities around the world. A significant number of them are stationed near China – in Japan and South Korea. By contrast, China has only one foreign military base, in Djibouti, and zero military bases near US borders. Furthermore, China has not fired a single bullet in international warfare in over 40 years, while during this time the US has invaded, bombed or carried out regime-change operations in over a dozen Global South countries. If there is any state that poses a known threat to world peace and security, it is the US. The real reason for Western warmongering is because China is achieving sovereign development and this is undermining the imperial arrangement on which Western capital accumulation depends. The West will not let global economic power slip from its hands so easily. The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
