DgcityChinese Premier Li Qiang will travel to Thailand on Friday for a three-day official visit before heading to Manila for the 29th China-ASEAN Summit, the foreign ministry announced on Wednesday. The back-to-back trips put Southeast Asia at the center of Beijing’s diplomacy in the week leading up to the APEC leaders’ meeting that China is hosting in Shenzhen.
Li’s stop in Thailand, from November 13 to 15, comes at the invitation of Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. The two countries describe each other as a community with a shared future, and Chinese officials say the visit will focus on strategic coordination and practical cooperation, from trade and infrastructure to tourism, which has only partly recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
From there, Li flies to the Philippines for the November 15-16 summit hosted by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., this year’s rotating ASEAN chair. Beijing said it would use the meeting to push for the early entry into force of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 upgrade, a deal signed last year that opens more of the region’s markets in services, green goods and digital trade.
This year marks five years since China and ASEAN upgraded relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership. China has remained the bloc’s largest trading partner throughout, with two-way trade running well above pre-pandemic levels, even as maritime disputes in the South China Sea and competition over critical minerals and export controls have tested ties. Several Southeast Asian capitals are weighing how hard to press those concerns in a leaders’ communique while keeping investment and tourism channels open.
Beijing’s agenda for Manila also lists artificial intelligence, the digital economy, energy security, connectivity and poverty reduction, areas where Chinese investment and technology have expanded rapidly. The foreign ministry cast the summit as a chance to add what it called stability and certainty to a region unsettled by tariff friction and great-power rivalry.
The trip is a warm-up of sorts for Shenzhen, where leaders from across the Asia-Pacific gather the following week for the first APEC summit hosted by China in more than a decade. Li’s appearances in Bangkok and Manila let China present itself as a predictable neighbor first, even as its president prepares to host a larger field, including a United States delegation fresh from an extended tariff truce and a Japanese government whose relations with Beijing remain unusually cold.