Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, together with leaders and officials of China and ASEAN countries, attended the opening ceremony of the 20th China-ASEAN Expo (CAEXPO) and China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit (CABIS) in Nanning city, China's Guangxi province, on September 17 morning.
Speaking at the ceremony, PM Chinh emphasised that CAEXPO and CABIS are important and prestigious events on economic, trade, and investment cooperation of the ASEAN-China business community. After 20 editions, they have become a symbol and guiding flags of economic, trade, and investment cooperation between China and ASEAN.
The past 20 years witnessed great strides in China-ASEAN relations, with bilateral trade increasing from 78.2 billion USD in 2003 to 975.6 billion USD in 2022, making China and ASEAN largest trading partners and leading investment partners of each other.
To strengthen the ASEAN-China cooperation and take advantage of the CAEXPO and CABIS mechanisms to bring practical benefits to regional countries, the PM proposed strongly promoting bilateral trade in a balanced and sustainable manner, striving to turn ASEAN into China's first trading partner with trade value exceeding 1 trillion USD. He also suggested coordinating to build linkage chains from raw material areas to production centres and product consumption systems, and continuing to open the market, combating protectionism, cooperating to improve adaptation ability to new standards, new tastes, and green products, while promoting science - technology cooperation and innovation.
He also emphasised the need to promote strategic connection to develop both hard and soft infrastructure, and strengthen traffic infrastructure connections and multi-modal transport, especially railways and roads.
Beside, he highlighted the strengthening of people-to-people exchange and cooperation in culture, tourism, and aviation, while enhancing collaboration in emerging fields, creating new growth drivers such as the green economy, digital economy, circular economy, new materials, and sharing economy.
According to the PM, in that process, the ASEAN and Chinese business communities need to learn, exploit, and help each other to take advantage of opportunities from CAEXPO and CABIS, turning potential and cooperation opportunities into specific results and products.
He affirmed that Vietnam is an active member contributing to the overall success of 20 CAEXPO and CABIS editions. This year, Vietnam's trade pavilion has the largest scale with the participation of 120 businesses displaying diverse and quality products in areas that Vietnam is strong in and is highly complementary to the Chinese market at 200 booths.
While attending CAEXPO and CABIS, PM Chinh visited the Vietnamese and Chinese trade pavilions.
