"China Plus One" describes a diversification strategy where a buyer keeps Chinese manufacturing for some products or process steps while adding a second country — commonly Vietnam, India or Mexico — for others, rather than relocating entirely. For most buyers actually doing this, China remains the larger or more established side of the split, not something being phased out.
The logistics complexity this adds is coordination, not replacement: a buyer running final assembly in Vietnam using Chinese-made components still needs China-side logistics for those components, now feeding into a cross-border leg into Vietnam rather than directly into an export container. That intra-Asia component flow is often underestimated in the planning stage, since the attention naturally goes to the new country's logistics rather than the China-side supply feeding it.
Rules of origin become a live question under this model in a way they are not for single-country sourcing — a product assembled in Vietnam from majority-Chinese components may or may not qualify for Vietnam-origin treatment under a given destination market's rules, which affects both tariff exposure and whether it is caught by China-specific trade remedies.
For an importer running a China Plus One strategy, the practical ask of a logistics partner is usually not replacing China-side support but extending it — coordinating the Chinese-origin component flow into whichever assembly country sits downstream, which is exactly the kind of multi-leg coordination problem China-side logistics support is built to solve.