Washington urged to do more to support ASEAN

Wang Xiongchang, mayor of Qinzhou, a major port city in Guangxi, where a China-Malaysia industrial park has prospered over the past decade along with a dramatic increase in trade with Malaysia, said cooperation between the two countries is becoming increasingly extensive and in-depth, ultimately benefiting their people.

"Storytelling needs confidence, and must be supported by tangible economic and trade results－and we have this," Wang said.

Malaysian businessman Nick Koay, chairman of Maycham China Greater Bay, who has invested in China for more than a decade, said ASEAN and China have engaged in economic and trade cooperation for many years. "The RCEP policy, combined with the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area, will be more conducive to economic and trade cooperation between the two sides," he said.

Lei Xiaohua, a Southeast Asia studies researcher at the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, said the RCEP's importance lies not only in promoting the opening up of national markets, expanding the scale of intra-regional trade, and upgrading industrial and value chains. More crucially, it is about accelerating integration of economic and trade rules and mechanisms to realize the structural and paradigm shift in regional economic cooperation.

On the other hand, after the US withdrew from the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, its alternative, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, has remained vague, making it difficult to seize regional economic leadership.

Moreover, as some experts point out, ASEAN countries' cautious approach to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework stems from shared concerns that it may undermine ASEAN coherence and disrupt the regional balance that has witnessed rapid development in recent decades. The experts maintain that the US' attention to ASEAN will only be fleeting.