In the scrum to keep the wheels of trade turning, Chinese companies are pivoting to neighboring countries to escape President Trump’s crippling tariffs.

The hustle is on show in Vietnam. Factories that make everything from jeans to Christmas wreaths are trying to get there fast. The ones that have already moved are ramping up. The Chinese e-commerce platforms Alibaba and Shein are helping companies find manufacturing alternatives in Vietnam.

The race to get out of China has gathered so much pace in recent weeks that a social media genre of fixers has surfaced to offer tips on how to reroute goods through not only Vietnam, but places like Thailand and Malaysia too.

The cost of sending products to the United States has soared in recent weeks, forcing factories to find new trade routes. Last month, China’s exports to Southeast Asia surged as shipments to America plunged, Chinese government data released on Friday showed.

While Mr. Trump has imposed 145 percent tariffs on China, he has paused new tariffs on Vietnam and other Asian countries until early July. Factories across the region have gone into overdrive.

“It feels like everybody is rushing to find a Vietnamese partner,” said Vu Manh Hung, who owns seven factories in northern Vietnam and was inundated with requests from Chinese businesses.

They were hoping that his factories could take on orders that were now impossible to fulfill in China with such high tariffs. He did not seal any deals. But that was partly because his manufacturing lines were already busy, under pressure from American clients to deliver orders before July.

This sense of panic in the Chinese supply chain is familiar.

In 2018, during his first term, Mr. Trump’s tariffs on China caused many multinational companies to search for alternative locations to manufacture their goods. Those tariffs were not steep enough to kick off an exodus. Now, Mr. Trump’s tariffs are so high they have all but stopped trade between the two countries, even pushing Chinese businesses out of China.

For many Chinese companies, Vietnam is both a long-term solution and short-term fix. The countries share a border, and Vietnam has a large population of young people willing to do grinding factory work.

But there are challenges for Vietnam.

Along with the dozens of other countries whose tariffs are on hold, Vietnam is trying to work through a trade deal with American officials who want to limit China’s use of Vietnam as an alternative way into the United States for exports.

During the first U.S.-Chinese tariff war, Chinese companies built factories in Vietnam. Many of those factories are now ramping up orders. One of them is QIS Sport Goods, which opened operations in Vietnam in 2019.

“We are stronger now, and we can offer competitive prices to customers,” said Nguyen Jan, who is Vietnamese and joined the company three years ago. “Everything has been busier.”

QIS Sport Goods makes water sporting products like kickboards, surfboards and stand-up paddle boards at two factories, one in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan and another in northern Vietnam.

The company employs around 150 people in China and 400 in Vietnam, where it is hustling to hire more.

Another Chinese company, Dongguan Box, recently completed a production line in its Vietnamese factory just for its American customers like Tiffany & Company and Hallmark.

Rita Peng, the marketing manager, said the calls from her American customers started coming in April, when Mr. Trump began to escalate tariffs on Chinese goods. They asked: Could she quickly shift their production to Vietnam?

She was happy to oblige, but Ms. Peng said the change made little sense to her. Picking up an elaborate red gift box with a paper flower and a two-sided opening, she explained why.

“If I make this in China, this box is very easy to make,” she said. “Very easy. But if I make this whole box in Vietnam, the cost will be very high.”

A box that costs $1 to make in China costs $1.20 in Vietnam, she said, mostly because she needs to ship the raw materials. She said her clients still wanted her to use her Chinese factories to fill orders going to Europe.

Dongguan Box used to have 1,000 workers in China, but that number has been cut down to 200. In Vietnam, there are now 600 workers. But Ms. Peng said she was optimistic and thought that the situation was only temporary.

“I believe the U.S. will solve these problems soon,” she said.

E-commerce platforms are doing their part to help Chinese factories find substitutes.

The fast fashion platform Shein is offering incentives to Chinese factories to help with the cost of moving to Vietnam, according to one factory owner. And the e-commerce giant Alibaba, which helps merchants find business partners, has dispatched employees in Vietnam to help businesses find alternatives to China before the pause on tariffs in Vietnam ends, a Vietnamese account manager at Alibaba said.

Shein did not respond to a request for comment.

On Chinese social media, a flurry of agents have cropped up offering tips on how to skirt trade rules. For instance, one recent post on Xiaohongshu, the Chinese app also known as RedNote, outlined how to hide a product’s made-in-China origin by shipping it to Malaysia or another nearby country and repackaging it before sending it to the United States.

“Folks, the high tariffs imposed by the United States on China have reached an astonishing level,” the post said. “But it can’t stump us smart folks.”

The interest in Vietnam was evident recently in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Nie Shiwen, who owns a garment factory, said some of his peers had started to expand in Vietnam. For now, he has decided against doing this because of the logistics of getting fabric and other materials to Vietnam, which can take weeks.

“Nowhere is as fast as China,” Mr. Nie said.

But Jia Yue Technology, a Chinese company that makes Christmas ribbons, stockings, wreaths and gift bags, has already made the leap to Vietnam. Over the past three years it has shifted more than half its production from China, said Jack Xu, who was acting as a translator for a company representative at a trade fair in Ho Chi Minh City. And now it is mulling whether to do more in Vietnam because most of Jia Yue’s customers are in the United States.

“You know Christmas items,” Mr. Xu said, pointing to a wall of green, plastic wreaths. “Americans, they need it!”

Mr. Xu said he was confident that Jia Yue Technology would be able to weather the trade war since it had a foot in both countries. But he said he hoped that China and the United States could come to a deal.

“For most Chinese, we still want to sell things to Americans,” Mr. Xu said.

Reporting was contributed by Tung Ngo from Ho Chi Minh City, Zixu Wang from Hong Kong, and Meaghan Tobin and Siyi Zhao from Guangzhou, China.

The call from a supervisor came to the steel shop floor in Sheffield, England, on Thursday afternoon: The tariffs were off. “Everything had changed for us,” said Richard Bott, as he stood near stacks of steel slabs still radiating waves of heat from the mill.

In a trade deal with Britain announced with much fanfare on Thursday, President Trump agreed to lift the 25 percent tariffs on steel that had posed a dire threat to Britain’s struggling industry and to Mr. Bott’s employer, Marcegaglia Stainless Sheffield.

The cavernous plant is one of the last remaining large steel-making facilities in a city that since the 18th century was a hub of innovation in the industry.

The plant is now old and dusty, but it is in some ways avant-garde. It uses an electric furnace, a technology the government wants other mills to adopt to reduce emissions, to melt piles of sparkling stainless steel scrap into molten metal.

Marcegaglia, part of a family-owned company in Italy, ships more than 100 million pounds’ (or about $133 million) worth of steel from Britain to the United States annually, around a quarter of the country’s steel exports.

The U.S. tariffs, which were announced in February but went into effect in March, added substantial costs and complexities to what was already a declining industry. British steel makers are struggling with weak demand, outside competition, and high energy and environmental costs.

The difficulties were highlighted recently when the government took control of Britain’s last major steel mill, at Scunthorpe, about a 90-minute drive from Sheffield, fearing that the plant’s Chinese owners would shut it down.

Marcegaglia, which ships finished and semifinished stainless steel products to the United States, where it has a mill in Richburg, S.C., was seeing “a slowdown in demand as customers decided whether they wanted to pay the 25 percent duty or not,” said Liam Bates, a Marcegaglia president.

In one effort to mitigate the damage, Marcegaglia raced to load a barge with steel and send it across the Atlantic to arrive before the tariffs took effect, but it arrived too late, adding millions of dollars in costs.

On Friday, there was a cautious sense of relief at the plant, which employs 440. “It’s good news for the company and the country,” said Ryan Johnson, a project engineer.

Christian Bruggmann, the plant’s chief operating officer, said he had thought tariffs would be lifted on much of the material that Marcegaglia exported to the United States. “At least some of our customers in the U.S. will pick up the phone and try to make it work,” he said.

Company officials, though, say they still don’t know what the deal means for products that are shipped from Britain to European Union countries like Sweden for further processing and then on to the United States.

The 25 percent tariff on steel imported into the United States is still in place for other countries. What tariffs will wind up applying to the European Union remains to be seen, creating a large unknown for a British business that sends large amounts of its output to both Europe and the United States.

The Trump administration’s impulsive approach to trade policy also creates uncertainty and saps confidence, they say.

“There doesn’t seem to be a structure, so you can’t plan anything,” said Tracey Wilshaw, the plant’s planning manager. “Which doesn’t give us any stability at all.”

Still, Ms. Wilshaw said she was more optimistic after Thursday’s announcement.

Steel UK, an industry group, welcomed the easing of tariffs, saying the United States was Britain’s second-most-important market for steel after the European Union, accounting for about 9 percent of sales by volume.

Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has risen to the defense of the domestic steel industry recently, but these businesses are dwindling and remain endangered. Only 35 percent of demand for steel in Britain is now met by domestic production, according to Steel UK.

Dave Brooks, the manufacturing manager at Marcegaglia, recalled joining the steel business as a 16-year-old trainee in 1986 and having the opportunity to work at other facilities, including a research and development center.

These units, he said, have all been closed in the waves of corporate takeovers and consolidations in the British and European industry in recent decades.

Still, steelworkers seem to be a resilient community that mostly enjoys the work and sees little point in looking at the downsides.

“Just grin and bear” it, said Simon Flynn, a contractor.

Top economic officials from the United States and China are poised to meet in Geneva on Saturday for high-stakes negotiations that could determine the fate of a global economy that has been jolted by President Trump’s trade war.

The meetings, scheduled to continue on Sunday, will be the first since Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent and China retaliated with its own levies of 125 percent on U.S. goods. The tit-for-tat effectively cut off trade between the world’s largest economies while raising the possibility of a global economic downturn.

While the stakes for the meetings are high, expectations for a breakthrough that results in a meaningful reduction in tariffs are low. It has taken weeks for China and the United States to even agree to talk, and many analysts expect this weekend’s discussions to revolve around determining what each side wants and how negotiations could move forward.

Still, the fact that Beijing and Washington are finally talking has raised hopes that the tension between them could be defused and that the tariffs could ultimately be lowered. The impact of the levies is already rippling across the global economy, reorienting supply chains and causing businesses to pass additional costs onto consumers.

The negotiations will be watched closely by economists and investors, who fear that a U.S.-Chinese economic war will lead to slower growth and higher prices around the world. Businesses, particularly those that rely on Chinese imports, are also on high alert about the talks as they grapple with how to cope with the new taxes and the uncertainty about whether they will remain in place.

“Both the U.S. and China have strong economic and financial interests in de-escalating their trade hostilities, but a durable détente is hardly in the offing,” said Eswar Prasad, a former director of the International Monetary Fund’s China division.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “it represents significant progress that the two sides are at least initiating high-level negotiations, offering the hope that they will temper their rhetoric and pull back from further overt hostilities on trade and other aspects of their economic relationship.”

The Trump administration’s negotiators are being led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who has said the current tariff levels are unsustainable. He will be joined by Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, who helped design Mr. Trump’s first-term trade agenda, which included a “Phase 1” deal with China. Mr. Trump’s hawkish trade adviser, Peter Navarro, was not scheduled to participate in the talks.

He Lifeng, China’s vice premier for economic policy, is leading the talks on behalf of Beijing. The Chinese government has not confirmed who else will be with Mr. He at the meetings or if Wang Xiaohong, China’s minister of public security, who directs its narcotics control commission, will attend. Mr. Wang’s participation would be a sign that the two sides might discuss Mr. Trump’s concerns about China’s role in helping fentanyl flow into the United States.

The trade fight has started to take a toll on the world’s largest economies. On Friday, China reported that its exports to the United States in April dropped 21 percent from a year earlier. Some of the largest U.S. companies have said they will have to raise prices to deal with the tariffs, cutting against Mr. Trump’s promise to “end” inflation.

On Friday, Mr. Trump signaled that he was prepared to begin lowering tariffs, suggesting that an 80 percent rate on Chinese imports seemed appropriate. Later in the day, referring to the China trade talks, Mr. Trump said, “We have to make a great deal for America.” He added that he would not be disappointed if a deal was not reached right away, arguing that not doing business is also a good deal for the United States.

The president also reiterated that he had suggested lowering the China tariffs to 80 percent, adding, “We’ll see how that works out.”

The Trump administration has accused China of unfairly subsidizing key sectors of its economy and flooding the world with cheap goods. The United States has also been pressuring China to take more aggressive steps to curb exports of precursors for fentanyl, a drug that has killed millions of Americans.

China has been steadfast in saying it does not intend to make trade concessions in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Officials have insisted that the nation agreed to engage in talks at the request of the United States.

“This tariff war was launched by the U.S. side,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said this week. “If the U.S. genuinely wants a negotiated solution, it should stop making threats and exerting pressure, and engage in talks with China on the basis of equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit.”

An 80 percent tariff, while a big drop from the current 145 percent, would still most likely shut off most trade between the countries.

China and the United States could take other concrete gestures to help pave the way for future negotiations, other experts said.

One option would be to scale back tariffs to about 20 percent, where they were in early April before Mr. Trump announced 34 percent levies on goods from China and mutual retaliation ensued, said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

“If we can scale back to that stage, then I think it will be a major progress in leading towards more constructive negotiations,” Mr. Wu said.

He said China was prepared to talk about fentanyl as a separate issue, adding that China had offered to sit down with the Trump administration in February after Mr. Trump first announced plans to impose tariffs on Chinese goods, citing the flow of illegal fentanyl into the United States.

The United States and China are meeting in proximity to the headquarters of the World Trade Organization, which has sharply criticized Mr. Trump’s tariff wars. The group has forecast that the continued division of the global economy into “rival blocs” could cut global gross domestic product by nearly 7 percent over the long run, particularly harming the world’s poorest countries. A spokesman for the W.T.O. said it welcomed the talks as a step toward de-escalation.

The alternative — a world in which the United States and China no longer engage in trade — could be economically painful and destabilizing. American consumers, who have come to rely on cheap goods from China, could soon confront thinly stocked store shelves and high prices for the products that remain.

The National Retail Federation said on Friday that import cargo traffic in the United States is expected to decline this year for the first time since 2023, when supply chain problems were persistent, and attributed the decline to Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

“We are starting to see the true impact of President Trump’s tariffs on the supply chain,” said Jonathan Gold, the retail federation’s vice president for supply chain and customs policy. “In the end, these tariffs will affect consumers in the form of higher prices and less availability on store shelves.”

The Trump administration has been racing to make trade deals with 17 other major trading partners after the president’s decision to pause the reciprocal tariffs he announced in April. On Friday, he hailed a preliminary agreement with Britain as evidence that his tariff strategy was working.

Economists have been heartened by signs that the White House appears ready to scale back tariffs.

“This rush to demonstrate progress on ‘deals’ reveals a rising desperation within the administration to roll back tariffs before they hit G.D.P. growth and inflation,” Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist for Capital Economics, wrote in a note to clients. “With the slump in incoming container ships from China raising fears of imminent shortages in the U.S., the pressure is building on the Trump administration to de-escalate that tariff buildup.”

Capital Economics estimates that if the United States lowered its tariffs on China to 54 percent, the overall effective tariff rate on imports for the United States would fall to 15 percent from 23 percent. That would put its growth and inflation forecasts back in line with its estimates from earlier this year that were based on Mr. Trump’s campaign pledges.

It remains unclear whether Mr. Trump would accept a 54 percent tariff rate.

On Friday, he suggested that he was prepared to lower tariffs to 80 percent as he gave Mr. Bessent the authority to make a deal.

“80% Tariff on China seems right! Up to Scott B.,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.

Later in the day, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that 80 percent figure was not an official offer and was instead “a number that the president threw out there.” She added that Mr. Trump would not lower tariffs on China unless Beijing also reduced its levies.