Capping a week of courting the world’s top CEOs, China’s President Xi Jinping on Friday made one of his most impassioned defences yet of international trade, as the system of globalised supply chains that helped catapult China to economic superpower status teeters on the brink.

Just days before Donald Trump’s self-declared “liberation day” on April 2, when the US president is set to unleash a new wave of tariffs on America’s trading partners, a smiling Xi led a group of more than 40 global business leaders into an ornate room in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Without naming the US, Xi told his guests, who ranged from HSBC’s Georges Elhedery and Mercedes-Benz’s Ola K?llenius to Saudi Aramco’s Amin Nasser and Toyota’s Akio Toyoda, that some countries were “weaponising” trade and “forcing companies to take sides and make choices that go against economic principles”.