When it comes to braggadocio and relentless self-promotion on the world stage, no leader is a match for Donald Trump and there are few who would even try.

But Xi Jinping’s efforts to recast China as the chief defender of global free trade and stable supply chains require their own breathtaking audacity.

Headline act: Xi Jinping’s pitch to APEC leaders for unity was helped by Donald Trump skipping the two-day leaders’ dialogue to get home for Halloween.Credit: Illustration: Benke

The Chinese president stepped onto the summit stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in South Korea last week and evangelised to a room of world leaders, Anthony Albanese included, about the need to “join hands rather than part ways” and safeguard free trade in the face of “rough seas”.

It helped Xi’s pitch that Trump had indeed parted ways from the summit early, skipping the two-day leaders’ dialogue to return to the White House for Halloween as his government slugged into its second month of shutdown.

Trump’s tariff warfare has done more than generate some choppy surf. It has unleashed chaos on the global trading system to the extent that it is rewiring alliances.

But only days earlier, as he sat across the negotiating table from Trump at South Korea’s Busan military airbase, Xi was threatening to cut off global access to China’s rare earths supplies, using Beijing’s virtual monopoly over this critically important sector as leverage in their trade feud. Damn the consequences for other countries.

He said, Xi said: Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Busan, South Korea on October 30. Credit: Getty

Under the truce struck with Trump, Xi has deferred for one year sweeping new export controls........

© The Sydney Morning Herald