Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

As the APEC summit gets underway in South Korea, this region stands at a critical junction in its development. 

Over the past decade, I've been to Southeast Asia and South America several times. I also lived and worked in both areas for years. 

Yet even for someone who's seen it up close, the speed and scale of Asia-Pacific's economic transformation are difficult to fully grasp.

Perhaps the most striking shift has been the unraveling of tightly woven economic ties. In just 10 years, this region's once high level of integration has fractured, and patching things back together now looks both urgent and challenging.

Vietnam offers a vivid example. In 2016, during a visit there, I found the country brimming with optimism. Multinational companies were building factories. Young people were flocking from rural villages to assembly lines and earning several times what they could back home. 

There was a labor shortage in industrial parks - a clear sign of prosperity. 

That boom continued and even intensified after 2018. Under the strain of US-China trade tensions, global manufacturers began shifting production out of China, with Vietnam becoming a prime alternative. 

But the good times didn't last. 

The pandemic, layered with a series of trade and investment policy shifts, disrupted these delicate links. By 2025, Vietnam's job market looked very different. Major suppliers are shedding thousands of workers. Industry giants like Samsung and Foxconn began large-scale downsizing since late 2024. Entire sectors - electronics, textiles, assembly - now employ far fewer young workers.

One of the most significant root causes of this turmoil lies in American strategic realignment. The US trade tensions with China, which began in 2018 and were followed by additional restrictions on Chinese manufacturing, disrupted production and supply networks across the region.

Tariffs also complicated trade relationships, leading many countries to explore alternative "Plan B" production bases.

According to an October 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), China and the US combined accounted for 43 percent of global GDP. From 1990 to 2023, countries in the region benefited from proximity to China and access to the US market: Vietnam grew 66-fold, Singapore grew 14-fold, Indonesia grew 13-fold, and Malaysia grew 9-fold. These gains forged deep dependencies - economies built factories, logistics systems, and financial systems, and attracted skilled workers around supply chains linking China and the US.

But inconsistencies in American policy have contributed to a disruption of these links. The "decoupling" from China and the "China Plus One" strategy led companies to explore new production bases in countries like Vietnam - for a time.

In earlier decades, the Asia-Pacific region benefitted from strong ties with both the US and Chinese markets, but later, efforts to reshape these links are pushing partners toward a more complex choice.

This shifting dynamic is not only challenging for Asia - it also presents risks for the US, as undermining the region's growth does not lead to clear benefits for anyone.

Supply chain turbulence is just the surface; the deeper harm is to the multilateral cooperation that underpins stability here. 

This very pressure is prompting Asia-Pacific countries to look elsewhere. China is steadily expanding its influence through frameworks like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area. Trade volume and policy transparency have both grown markedly - these China-linked arrangements offer greater predictability. 

Asia-Pacific has learned time and again that cooperation pays off better than confrontation. Genuine prosperity requires China and the US to work together; only through multilateral openness can nations best serve their own interests and share in growth.

For a long time to come, Asia-Pacific's most important task will be to defend openness and regional cooperation in the face of outside shocks - doing everything possible to limit the damage from supply chain disruptions and keep the doors to growth open.

The author is a senior editor with the People's Daily and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn. Follow him on X @dinggangchina