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Chinese President Xi Jinping meeting with global business leaders in Beijing today urging them to protect global industry and supply chains amid the escalating trade war. Around 40 executives joined the meeting including leaders from Pfizer, Qualcomm, Blackstone, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and FedEx. Here now to discuss is Shahzad Qazi, he's China Beige Books International Managing Director. Shahzad, great to have you in studio with us. So the pitch from Xi Jinping is that globalization, the train has left the station. Do you think that this pitch to CEOs to continue to work with China is going to work with these executives amid the escalating tit-for-tat with the US over trade?

So these executives uh that were at the forum uh at this meeting specifically are some of China's closest friends in America. The question I think President Xi should be asking himself is that these folks who at one point got to pretty much dictate American trade policy, how much sway and how much influence do they have in Trump's Washington today?

And what, I guess, what is the answer to that given the fact that, and what does it mean for these businesses right because they can't look too friendly to China because they don't want to upset the president amid a tariff war but they also potentially want to leave themselves open to opportunities with China in case this tariff war gets to a place where they need to lean on other countries. How do they navigate that?

Yeah, I mean they're certainly in a hard spot because, you know, they are the first ones to lose when there are tariffs and they get also punished potentially in China when there are retaliatory measures by Beijing. Um that said, you know, I think DC has changed pretty significantly and especially the administration right now, I think contrary to what markets think is very serious about altering America's trade relations with the world specifically with China, uh which I think means that these corporate CEOs will not be getting the type of hearing and audience that they are used to perhaps.

Yeah, I had a question for you. You know, people say one thing and do the other a lot of times, companies are no different. We're seeing a lot of companies announced big investments in the US. My question though is a lot of them are just increases in what they're doing. What's going on on China's side, right? Are these companies still keeping that spending and just not talking about it? The levels of investment directly there.

Yeah, the China picture has become really interesting because you have actually their own Chinese suppliers that are saying we're going to go to Vietnam, we're going to go to Cambodia, and of course, we're going to go to Mexico because that's the only way we can get away from tariffs. That of course creates a whole other issue on the policy front for policymakers to address which is known as transshipment, which is that oftentimes my joke is that you put the final lace in the sneaker, you know, at some third country and send it to the US so you can avoid tariffs.

And I guess I wonder to what extent you think that that is something that the president is going to work to punish. We've already seen this. He talked about how if the EU and Canada work together, they're going to face even more tariffs. Should companies be prepared to get punished for any type of workaround that they might enact?

Uh I would say that companies need to be prepared for a lot more trade policy uncertainty uh both in terms of what tariffs are rolled out next week and then how this tariff saga continues because I don't think this is leaving us anytime soon.