But the path is going to be bumpy, because the US consumer market is too big to be substituted by major markets now. Success can be achieved, however, because China's trade with its other top four trading partners — the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, the Republic of Korea and Japan — last year reached $2.4 trillion, over three times more than that with the US. And for ASEAN, its trade with the same group of economies was nearly three times than that with the US.

　　However, the US tariff shock has highlighted two critical factors — internationalism rests on the domestic political situation, and choke points in trade are in both technology and consumption — which should be eliminated by the RCEP to make its supply chains more resilient in the future.

　　It is not trade but the economic decline of traditional manufacturing in the US' Rust Belt that has fueled populism in the country and prompted it to retreat from globalization.

　　The US' hegemony in global value chains is rooted in the country's technological capabilities that dominate upstream chains, and consumption power that controls end-user chains. Both are choke points that allow the US to control global value chains. The latter is particularly important because it is the end-user chain that shapes the entire production process.

　　China has been making greater efforts to clear the supply-side bottlenecks and achieve self-determination in technology.

　　Besides, ASEAN often positions itself as an integrated production hub, and rarely as a unified market for consumer goods — and intra-regional trade accounts for merely one-fifth of its total trade, indicating that ASEAN is far from the end-user chain.