In late 2024, the Guangdong SME Development Promotion Association began planning a program called the "Overseas Chinese Young Entrepreneurs Starsea Leadership Program." The program aims to develop a new generation of elite young ethnic-Chinese entrepreneurs who are globally minded, driven to innovate, and able to think long term, and to deepen exchange and cooperation between entrepreneurs at home and overseas Chinese entrepreneurs abroad. Its content covers China's industrial upgrading and the reshaping of global value chains, digital civilization and the collaboration revolution, new paradigms for manufacturing going global, technical-standard exports, and discourse on innovation and the future of commerce.
On April 2, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order on "reciprocal tariffs." The United States imposed a 34% reciprocal tariff on China, 20% on the European Union, and 46%, 36%, and 32% on Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia respectively. These tariffs disrupted the international strategies of Chinese enterprises.
The boxer's "clinch"
One entrepreneur, Mr. Xu, who has invested in Vietnam, believes that "2025 is a make-or-break year for Chinese manufacturers whose main market is the U.S." In the face of the new tariffs he offers three suggestions: go out together to deal with market uncertainty; make organizational adjustments to build a cadre of managers capable of leading teams of mixed cultural backgrounds around the world; and adopt the "clinch" tactic from boxing — stand close to your customers and ride out the global supply-chain shocks together.
In Xu's read, investing in Vietnam does not solve the 46% tariff problem in the short run, but Vietnam itself should be able to negotiate a U.S.-Vietnam tariff deal. The U.S. and Vietnam do not directly compete in economic terms — Vietnamese-made labor-intensive products have little to do with the manufacturing the U.S. wants to bring home. If neither the U.S.-Vietnam nor the U.S.-China side reaches a new tariff agreement, he argues, the U.S. consumer goods market will inevitably see inflation.
From product to customer
Firms in categories such as competitive toys, which fall outside the tariff scope, will continue to sell globally. Some enterprises have already set up companies and sales networks in the U.S.; some are about to lose customers because of the new tariffs; many have responded by raising prices; some have shelved plans to acquire land and build factories in Indonesia.
Mr. Meng, who has invested in Thailand and Malaysia, has recently hosted many Chinese enterprises with revenues of over 10 billion yuan. He sorts them into three groups: those actively opening new markets, those adjusting production footprint, and those waiting to see.
Ceiling-fan entrepreneur Ms. A-Ya plans to build a new plant in Mexico, drawing on Mexico's NAFTA advantages and its proximity to the U.S. market. She notes, "The core of international trade is to command the information gap." As firms move from being exhibitors at the Canton Fair to being buyers, the ones going out are starting to gain new room — the room of information asymmetry.
Mr. Li of Ping'an Qisheng, who has set up a sales company in the U.S., says that the old mindset was a factory mindset; what is needed now is the ability to read customer demand and information, not just manufacturing capability. "An enterprise must understand demand better than its suppliers do, and can no longer see itself as a small firm, as a mere manufacturer."
Mr. Geng of Guangzhou Yierda proposes pouring effort into automation to reduce production cost. He believes that "shifting from 'selling products' to 'selling solutions,' and helping the target country build out its own industrialization, may well be the greatest certainty for Chinese manufacturing going forward."
From cost waystation to global lab
Rao Zhan, chief architect at the Guangdong Manufacturing Innovation Center, argues that the U.S. still holds the power to make the goods, the reserve currency, and the rules in global trade. What is called de-globalization is in essence de-Sinification — the aim is to force advanced manufacturing back to the U.S.
The cost-driven "voyage south" will no longer carry enterprises far. Going global now calls for a new layout — a shift from "looking at goods" to "looking at people." Firms used to do business on cost, quality, and delivery; in the future they need to develop close to customers and close to markets. Rao suggests that entrepreneurs rebuild their teams with the mindset of a second founding, moving closer to the customer to serve.
Enterprises must complete a shift in thinking from enterprise to industry, from internal architecture to customer ecosystem. They need to put budget into market and customer insight, and build R&D, compliance research, actuarial work, content, and paid media around the market.
Rao's view is that "if Chinese enterprises can do this, they may lose the U.S. market — but they will gain the rest of the world."
Mr. Wu of Aojin Springs, who has operated in Thailand for years, says Chinese firms there are calm about the U.S.-China tariff war, and many large firms are still increasing investment. Thailand maintains good relations with the United States, has deep ethnic-Chinese roots, and has long been friendly to China.
New content and new order
In March, the BMW Group announced a "360-degree full-chain AI" strategy in China. BMW will integrate DeepSeek and plans to apply it to future Chinese-market New Generation models. What BMW is really doing is re-engineering its manufacturing DNA: the content is no longer Bavarian mechanical engineering but a Chinese solution for the digital-intelligence era.
BMW's counter-offensive on technology and market is right to stay close to Chinese supply chains and to adopt more of the concepts and definitions coming out of Chinese products. BMW's reading of intelligence is: do not build smart devices on wheels — weave intelligence into the bloodstream of the car. Intelligence must be rebuilt from the underlying architecture up; it is not a stacking of devices.
German firms are strongly drawn to China's innovation ecosystem. Mercedes-Benz has upgraded its philosophy from "In China, for China" to "In China, for the world." BMW hopes to turn the ecosystem advantages of Chinese carmakers into new global advantages.
German firms are clear-eyed about how capital and politics erode manufacturing, rational about how the content of manufacturing is being iterated and rewritten in the digital era, and clear-headed about the structure of globalization, and they make rational judgments on that basis. De-politicization and de-capitalization make thinking about manufacturing sharper and more objective — this should be the starting point for Chinese enterprises' thinking about internationalization.
Entrepreneurship and the bedrock of civilization
At the end of the nineteenth century, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism laid bare the cultural roots of the capitalist spirit. The Protestant ethic pushed the spirit of capitalism into being: believers had to prove they were among God's elect through worldly vocational success; labor was treated as a sacred calling; luxury and indulgence were rejected, and capital accumulation encouraged.
As capitalism industrialized and globalized, religious ethics were gradually replaced by instrumental reason and secular rules. Weber used the word "disenchantment" to describe modern civilization shaking off its naïveté — while at the same time losing the ethical meaning that had anchored it, which left commercial development in trouble.
Once capitalism matured, religious motivation faded, instrumental reason took over, and an "iron cage" formed: the human being bound by a rationalized economic system, with value-rationality missing. A commercial society without ethical constraints is capitalism after disenchantment.
Western commercial thinkers have pushed hard for a shift from "profit maximization" to "system symbiosis." The new commercial ethics is no longer a decorative moral veneer on the enterprise — it is a condition of survival. They have tried to build a "systems ethic": to treat commerce as part of the living network of the planet and to bear responsibility for ecological repair, social justice, and technological restraint. But those voices were cut short by the new wave of "America First."
In Mankind and Mother Earth and related writing, the British historian Arnold Toynbee suggested that the historical experience and wisdom of Chinese civilization might help humanity face the global crises brought on by Western technological civilization. Toynbee said the twenty-first century would be the Chinese century — Chinese culture, and Confucianism and Mahayana Buddhism in particular, would lead humanity toward peace and stability. The product of combining Eastern and Western culture, he held, would be humanity's best and most lasting new culture.
Toynbee's condition was that China must complete a creative transformation of its own tradition, combining Confucian ethics with modern governance, before it could become a "prototype of a global state" and provide humanity with a governance model that moves beyond nation-state conflict.
In German manufacturing culture, "scientific rationality, meticulous care, the pursuit of perfection, and reasonable profit" have long been fused into the German people and into German manufacturing. When German manufacturing culture meets China's manufacturing innovation ecosystem, the two together generate new values.
While exporting industrialization capacity to the developing world, China is building a multipolar and more inclusive global trade system. Reshaped by AI, Chinese manufacturing is turning its strong engineering DNA into a digital-era dividend, and is pushing into an entirely new arena of practical technological pragmatism: not chasing absolute technological leadership, but redefining the rules of global innovation through cost reconstruction, deep engagement with use cases, and ecosystem collaboration.
Many enterprises do find things difficult. But more see the U.S. tariffs as challenge and opportunity both. Chinese enterprises need to move forward on the twin wheels of resilience and vitality, opening a new path in the civilizational contest.
The problem with globalization and world trade is structural. The new internationalization of Chinese enterprises has already begun; they will continue along the course they have set and should not be pushed off it.
The internationalization of Chinese enterprises should still be a sea of stars — even if, for now, the mood is not yet as confident and unwavering as that phrase suggests.
Originally published: Economic Observer · Microscope · 2025-05-17 · Read original →
Originally published in the "Economic Observer · The Walker’s View" column. The author is Executive President of the Guangdong SME Development Promotion Association. For reprints or citations, please contact the author or the Association Secretariat.