Could Chinese President Xi Jinping have picked a more inconvenient moment to swan into Cambodia than April 17? Not only is it the anniversary of the Fall of Phnom Penh, when the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge marched into the capital in 1975.
It’s also over Khmer New Year, Cambodia’s biggest and most sacred national holiday, when for the entire week (although it’s technically just a holiday between April 13-16) the cities empty and seemingly the entire population heads to the provinces.
Anyone who’s lived in Cambodia for more than two minutes knows this: don’t plan anything formal during Khmer New Year. The cities are deserted. The shops are shut. Officials are on holiday. The police are off spending their “tea money” in provincial karaoke bars.
I’ve heard from a good many bureaucrats who are justifiably pissed off that they’ll now be at the office next week—so, too, one imagines, are the police and soldiers and translators and journalists, etc, etc, who’ll have to traipse back to the capital early to manage the state visit.
However, the timing seems quite deliberate. Beijing knows full well what Khmer New Year means. It knows how ASEAN governments treat their calendars. I’m struggling to remember Cambodia hosting another state visit over the holiday, just as China itself almost never hosts a state visit during Lunar New Year.
So why would an “ironclad friend” choose to spoil your most important holiday of the year? A show of force; a demonstration of the power imbalance? What was Cambodia going to do? Politely decline the visit? “Sorry, Mr Xi, we’re too busy that week. How about another day?”
However, the visit was planned months ago, so Beijing’s mood when it set this date is possibly not the same as it is now. Suppose the date was decided in January or February. At the time, for reasons too numerous to go into here, Beijing was particularly irate with Southeast Asian governments for not doing more to tackle their scam industries.
That was especially the case in January, after Chinese social media was alive with the news that the Chinese actor Wang Xing had been kidnapped in Thailand and forced to work in a scam compound in Myanmar. The Chinese state, which had just run a glitzy anti-scam propaganda campaign, was suddenly facing questions it didn’t like.
It is possible, then, that Beijing chose April 17 as the date for the state visit months ago as a passive-aggressive flex. Whether Xi arrives in Phnom Penh in a foul mood is unclear. The Cambodian authorities still haven’t done much about cyberscamming, so one imagines that Xi will have some strong words to say to the Big Man (Hun Sen) and the Big Boy (Hun Manet) about that.
However, global politics have changed. Much of what Donald Trump has done since January has arguably improved China’s position in Southeast Asia, not least because the White House has confirmed all of Southeast Asia’s worst fears about Trump 2.0. The steep 49% tariffs on Cambodia have especially altered the landscape.
According to one point of view, America is now in a strong position to pressure Phnom Penh to sever its ties or weaken them, with China. Yes, but. Yes, it has a strong position—but only if Phnom Penh thinks the disease is worse than the cure.
Talking to a few sources in Phnom Penh in recent days, the main takeaway I got was that Trump’s tariffs are more likely to push Cambodia even closer to China.
First, Chinese propagandists aren’t having to do much concocting at the moment. They’re quite right when they point out that Beijing now seems a lot more dependable than Washington.
Trump isn’t just unpredictable; he’s bullying. Phnom Penh has no way of knowing whether if it goes to its knees now and offers Washington most of what it wants to get tariffs off the table, Trump, in six month or a year, wouldn’t make even more demands. Simply put, there is no way Phnom Penh, nor any government, will truly trust Trump again.
Second, this isn’t specifically an economic issue. If it were just economic, Phnom Penh would (surely) have offered far more concessions to America than it currently has. Nothing’s more important for the economy than the country that buys more than a third of all your exports.
But it’s also political. One imagines that Beijing is pressuring Phnom Penh not to “give in” to Washington. Indeed, Beijing will probably think of this as the ideal moment to sever even more of Cambodia’s ties with the US.
As for Phnom Penh, for years, its response to any major pushback from a foreign government has been to make a grand promise, wait for the heat to die down and then do very little. Talk big, do nothing.
But Beijing is angry over Phnom Penh’s failure to tackle its scam industries. Washington is angry over Phnom Penh’s constant broken promises of rapprochement. And Trump is angry because of his own odd fetish for trade deficits.
Cambodia is damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t—and I don’t see how it can hedge its way out of this particular situation. (Maybe, maybe, the Trump administration will accept the financial/trade reforms that Phnom Penh has offered, but it seems like a long shot.)
And when you’re stuck, the natural instinct is to look for the easiest means of wriggling free, which for Phnom Penh means China. As one source put it, at least Xi is showing up; Trump couldn’t point to Cambodia on a map.
This article was first published on David Hutt’s Cambodia Unfiltered Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Cambodia Unfiltered subscriber here.