Mapping the China-Vietnam Trade Relationship: Key Trade Routes and Growth Drivers

Trade between China and Vietnam is booming: the two neighbouring countries have become each other’s most important regional trade partners as Vietnam serves as both an increasingly important export destination for Chinese goods and a trade hub linking the wider Asia-Pacific region.

Find Business Support

Support Economic Development with Asia Trade and Investment Programs

Connected by a long shared border and expanding logistics networks spanning road, rail, sea, and air, the commercial ties between China and Vietnam are deepening.

Demand for Chinese electronics and machinery in Vietnam is rising as Vietnam’s industrial base rapidly develops. At the same time, the disruption caused by the US’s tariffs has further fueled this growth, redirecting supply chains and pushing Chinese exporters to seek alternative markets to the benefit of Vietnam.

Vietnam-China trade in 2025

China is Vietnam’s largest single trade partner, with two-way trade reaching a record high of US$296 billion in 2025, according to data from China Customs. Vietnam is also China’s second-largest foreign export destination after the US, with shipments exceeding US$198 billion in value, around 5.2 percent of the country’s total exports.

China’s shipments to Vietnam have grown rapidly in recent years, driven by rising demand for Chinese input materials and consumer goods in Vietnam, as well as pressure on Chinese exporters to seek alternative markets to the US following the tumult of the US-China trade war. In 2025, China’s shipments to Vietnam increased 22.4 percent year-on-year.

Looking at China-Vietnam trade at a provincial level, a vivid picture emerges of the key trade routes that have formed between the two countries. Vietnam’s main provincial-level trade partners are primarily located in southern and eastern China, which benefit from both close geographical proximity and high industrial output – China’s southern and eastern provinces being the country’s traditional manufacturing and foreign trade powerhouses.

Find Business Support

Seamlessly Manage Your Operations Across Multiple Asian Markets

Vietnam’s largest provincial-level trade partner in China is the southern province of Guangdong. Two-way trade in 2025 exceeded US$63 billion, an increase of 12.3 percent over 2024. Guangdong is also China’s largest exporting province overall, accounting for almost a quarter of China’s total outbound trade.

While Vietnam is the destination for only a small proportion of Guangdong’s exports – around 4.5 percent in 2025 – shipments to Vietnam significantly outpaced the province’s overall exports, which have greatly suffered as a result of the US’s tariffs. Last year, Guangdong’s overall exports grew only 1.9 percent year-on-year, while shipments to Vietnam soared by 24.2 percent.

The eastern province of Jiangsu – another major manufacturing base – follows Guangdong as Vietnam’s second-largest provincial-level trade partner, with bilateral trade exceeding US$46 billion. Located on the Yangtze River Delta and a major hub for high-end manufacturing, Jiangsu, like Guangdong, is a key producer of export goods and strategically positioned for foreign trade.

However, the border province of Guangxi – which has historically lagged far behind its eastern neighbor in industrial development – is the second-largest exporter of goods to Vietnam after Guangdong, with total exports in 2025 reaching almost US$36 billion, accounting for over half of the province’s total exports. Guangxi’s exports to Vietnam, driven in part by continuous improvements in overland transport links, have grown significantly in recent years, increasing by 7.3 percent year-on-year in 2025.

Electronics and machinery dominate Vietnam-China trade

Find Business Support

Navigate Tariff Risks by Diversifying Your Supply Chain and Markets across Asia

Vietnam’s trade with China is overwhelmingly dominated by electronics and electronic components. In 2025, China exported over US$84 billion in electrical machinery and equipment to Vietnam, including US$26.7 billion in integrated circuits (ICs), US$11.7 billion in smartphones and other wireless devices, and US$11.09 billion in flat panel displays.

China also exported almost US$25 billion in industrial machinery and office equipment, including just under US$5 billion in storage batteries and US$4.5 billion in electronic subcomponents for accounting machines, cash registers, calculators, and other machines.

Many of these electronics exports come primarily from Vietnam’s three largest provincial trade partners: Jiangsu, Guangxi, and Guangdong. These three provinces alone account for well over half of China’s exports of flat panel displays and storage batteries to Vietnam, and over 70 percent of exports of smartphones and other telecom devices. Sichuan, meanwhile, is a major source of ICs, along with Jiangsu, which together account for almost 60 percent of China’s total IC exports to Vietnam.

Vietnam’s exports to China are similarly primarily driven by electronics, with China importing over US$22 billion in flat panel displays, US$10 billion in computers, and US$9 billion in electronic subcomponents of accounting machines from Vietnam in 2025.

China’s top importers of Vietnamese goods are Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Zhejiang. Vietnamese imports in China are spread over a more diverse group of provinces compared to exports. Nonetheless, Guangdong dominates imports across the major product segments, in particular parts and components for computers and calculating machines, as well as telephones and smartphones.

Key trade routes linking China and Vietnam

Find Business Support

Identify Business Risks with Entity Health Checks and Partner Review Services

Due to their proximity and both countries’ access to the sea, there is a vast array of trade routes linking China and Vietnam by land, sea, and air. China is home to six of the 10 largest container ports in the world, including four in the top five, which provide direct shipping routes to Ho Chi Minh, Haiphong, Da Nang, and other seaports in Vietnam.

Improvements to port infrastructure in Vietnam, such as the 2025 expansion of deep-water berths in Haiphong, have helped to streamline shipping between China and Vietnam and shorten shipping times by reducing the need for transshipment.

Two of the world’s busiest cargo airports are also in China – Shanghai Pudong International Airport and Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport – which have direct flight routes to Noi Bai International Airport and Tan Son Nhat International Airport, transporting cargo in less than a day. The construction of the cargo terminal at the Cat Bi International Airport in Haiphong will further increase air freight connectivity between the two countries.

While port-level import and export data is scarce, provincial-level trade data suggests the busiest sea trade routes between China and Vietnam are from the Pearl River Delta ports of Shenzhen and Guangzhou to the ports of Haiphong, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh, which, due to the relative proximity, enable shipments of goods in as little as two to four days.

Further to the north, direct freight shipping from the ports of Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan – two of the busiest ports in the world – takes around five to eight days for FCL shipments.

Ningbo-Zhoushan in Zhejiang Province also serves as an important node in logistics channels from China’s inland provinces to Vietnam, as part of a river-sea intermodal transport route. For instance, an initiative launched by the Ningbo Customs to reduce customs costs and procedures, and allowing for the direct transfer of goods from inland China onto cargo ships at Ningbo-Zhoushan, enabled the first full-haul shipment of 22 containers of fertilizer from Luohe, Henan Province, to Ho Chi Minh in just nine days, reduced from 15 days.

Guangxi, which shares a 1,020-kilometer-long border with Vietnam, is also home to several important trade land and sea trade links. The largest of these are Fangcheng Port and Qingzhou Port on the Beibu Gulf, which have direct links to Haiphong and Ho Chi Minh. Foreign trade through these two ports has surged in recent years – Fangcheng Port handled almost 135 million metric tons of goods in 2025, an increase of almost 20 percent from 2024, while trade through Qinzhou Port grew 7.2 percent over the same period to reach 67.6 million metric tons.

Beyond sea freight, overland border trade between China and Vietnam is becoming an increasingly important mode of goods shipment, driven by major improvements to road and rail links. A growing volume of goods now passes through the “Friendship Pass”, the main overland gateway between the two countries, located in Pingxiang County, Guangxi Province, on the Chinese side and Cao Loc District, Lạng Sơn Province, on the Vietnamese side. In 2025, goods shipped to and from the Chinese side of the Friendship Pass surged by 32 percent year-on-year to almost 7.3 million metric tons, according to Nanning Customs.

Find Business Support

Boost Your Growth by Expanding into Asia’s Rapidly Growing Markets

On May 14, 2025, China and Vietnam opened a new overland transport route connecting Kunming, Yunnan Province, and Nanning, Guangxi Province, with Hanoi, providing truck drivers with permits under the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Cross-Border Transport Facilitation Agreement (CBTA) to facilitate border crossings.

Rail cargo from Guangxi to Vietnam also hit a record high in 2025, with a total of 37,000 TEUs of goods shipped, up 86 percent from 2024, according to China Railway Nanning Bureau. According to the bureau, Guangxi accounted for 73 percent of China’s total freight volume and 86 percent of containerized goods exported to Vietnam by rail in 2025.

While Vietnam’s main trade with Guangxi is in electronics and machinery, the direct cross-border trade is facilitating greater two-way trade in agricultural goods, in particular imports of fresh fruits and vegetables, coffee, and seafood. In 2025, Guangxi imported over US$1.6 billion in agricultural goods from Vietnam, up almost 12 percent from 2024, according to customs data.

Impact of US tariffs on China-Vietnam trade

The US looms large over Vietnam-China bilateral trade, with US President Donald Trump having frequently excoriated China for using Vietnam as a transshipment hub to circumvent US tariffs on Chinese goods. The US has also taken steps to tackle this issue: in a framework trade deal between the US and Vietnam reached in July 2025, Trump stated that Vietnam had agreed to a 40 percent tariff on US-bound goods transshipped through Vietnam from third countries. This clause has widely been seen as an attempt to target Chinese reexports to the US, and could significantly impact Chinese exports to Vietnam. However, this deal has yet to be officially adopted, and the recent Supreme Court decision to strike down Trump’s tariff regime may lead to a recalibration of the terms.

The data does provide some indication that the increase in trade from China to Vietnam is partially driven by the US tariffs forcing Chinese exporters to find alternative trade routes. US imports from Vietnam have indeed risen over the course of 2025 as imports from China have dropped: Vietnamese imports grew from just under US$13 billion in January to over US$18 billion in December las year, while imports from China dropped from US$41.6 billion in January to US$21.1 billion in December, according to data from the US International Trade Commission. However, it is difficult to determine how much of the rise in Chinese exports to Vietnam is driven by the fall in Chinese exports to the US. It is equally unclear whether goods made with Chinese input materials and shipped from Vietnam to the US have been substantially processed in Vietnam before export.

Find Business Support

Transform Information into Strategy with Tailored Intelligence

Genuine demand for Chinese goods in Vietnam is rising as domestic industries develop rapidly, in particular electronics manufacturing. At the same time, Chinese exporters have been actively seeking alternative end markets for their goods following the US’s tariffs on Chinese goods, and Vietnam appears to be one of the primary beneficiaries of this trade diversion.

The relationship between China and the US has improved substantially in recent months, in particular since the two countries reached an agreement to lower bilateral trade barriers following a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in October. This tentative truce may be further reinforced after Trump’s planned visit to Beijing at the end of March, which could see the formulation of a more enduring trade deal.

The easing of tariff pressure on Chinese goods and improving US-China relations could see Chinese exporters return to the US market, to the possible detriment of exports to Vietnam. However, the many years of strengthening trade ties – through the expansion of logistics corridors, streamlined customs procedures, and the growth of Vietnam’s own industrial base and consumer market – mean that bilateral trade is likely to remain robust. The infrastructure and institutional foundations that have been built up over this period, from new cross-border rail links and deep-water port capacity to preferential trade arrangements under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA), have created durable commercial relationships that are unlikely to unwind simply due to shifts in US tariff conditions.

For international investors, Vietnam's different localities offer favorable conditions across almost every sector, particularly as the country shifts toward higher value-chain manufacturing, high-tech industries, and innovation. Taking a closer look at Vietnam's provinces and investment destinations before committing capital can provide a decisive competitive advantage. A tailored market study, dedicated location selection, or business matchmaking can uncover factors that are often hard to assess—such as special incentives, skilled labor availability, and tax breaks.

Huyen Do

Manager, Business Intelligence Vietnam

Talk to an expert at vietnam@dezshira.com

Or request a consultation at +84 28 3930 2828

• Previous Article APAs in Vietnam: How Businesses Can Manage Transfer Pricing Risks
• Next Article 从 “一点集中”到“多点绽放”：越南工业的新布局