President Trump's trade war with China is a multi-pronged thing, given how closely the east Asian states of the Pacific Rim are being affected. Those states are all U.S. allies, and the reason we project so much naval power in the Pacific.
While we are seeing a lot of doom and gloom talk in the endless 'analyses' you always see in Pacific Rim affairs on the economic side of things, including China itself declaring there will be 'no winners' (typical for the nation that is facing disaster itself), along with some stories of Pacific Rim states getting ready to profit from the whole thing, or else band together against the U.S,, there is a strategic trend that is worth watching: Some Pacific Rim nations are actually standing up to China.
I see two obvious cases, and think there could be more to follow.
Nation One, Malaysia. The news now is that President Mohamad Mahathir is telling China its lousy infrastructure deals have got to go. Bloomberg had the story a couple weeks ago and here's what MalayMail, via Yahoo! News, reports today:
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 13 — Putrajaya will attempt to cancel suspicious infrastructure projects previously awarded to Chinese firms, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said ahead of his visit to China later this week.
The prime minister told the Associated Press in an interview that he was committed to keeping ties with China cordial, but said this must not come at the detriment of Malaysian interests.
Samsung is closing a huge cellphone factory in China as of the end of 2018 for several reasons: their sales growth has faltered a bit with the PRC nationals unwilling to buy Korean in favor of their national brands, rising labor costs in China make them less and less competitive, their new plants opening in Vietnam and India are scheduled to come on line soon and the business climate for Korean companies in the PRC is getting very frosty. The majority of Samsung smartphones are already assembled in Vietnam.
Both Samsung and LG are shuttering their television factories in China based on the trade disputes between the PRC and the US.
The curtain is being pulled away from China, like it was from the Wizard, in The Wizard of Oz.
The Trump Administration's Peter Navarro recently published (at the Hudson Institute) a matrix that summarizes the many ways in which China fools and cheats Governments around the world.
The "debt trap" is a classic, that they have pulled hundreds of times. They sell the local Government (bribing officials) to sign up for a development project, that China will finance. Later, China pulls the rug out from underneath the business, and takes ownership of the asset through foreclosure.
A lot of countries are suddenly wising up that China is not giving anything away, but is ripping them off. At the same time, the aura of inevitability of China's dominance is being re-considered.
Here is the matrix:
