Spotlight: Economic, trade achievements made during Xi's state visit to Vietnam, Singapore

Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Vietnam and Singapore has achieved fruitful results in economy and trade, creating new momentum for inter-governmental cooperation and opportunities for industrial development, and charting the future course of cooperation.

With Xi's visit to the two countries, the dovetailing of China's Belt and Road initiative and Vietnam's and Singapore's development strategies has been implemented.

China's initiative on the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and Vietnam's "Two Corridors and One Economic Circle" plan could be docked through many ways, said Nguyen Ngoc Truong, former Vietnamese ambassador to five countries and now head of the Center of Strategy and International Studies, a private think-tank.

The connection between the Chinese initiative and the Vietnamese plan will definitely generate favorable outcomes, such as promoting cooperation in border areas and boosting infrastructure development for Vietnam, among others, he said.

In a joint communique, the two countries agreed to enhance their practical cooperation in such fields as construction material, equipment manufacture, electric power, and renewable resources.

To date, China has nearly 1,180 investment projects with a total registered capital of more than 8.4 billion U.S. dollars in Vietnam, ranking 9th among 105 countries and regions having investments in the country, according to the Foreign Investment Agency under the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment.

Singapore, which is adjacent to the Malacca Strait, is an important transfer station for China's maritime trade. So far, the Chinese investment in Singapore has accounted for 35 percent of all its investment to 64 countries along the Belt and Road routes.

As Singapore is a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Sino-Singapore cooperation is especially close. During Xi's visit, the two sides agreed to explore a new mode to expand the third-party market.

The two sides announced they would launch negotiations on upgrading their seven-year-old free trade agreement (FTA) and the third government-to-government (G2G) project in Chongqing city in southwest China, following the first in Suzhou in east China and the second in Tianjin in north China.

The third intergovernmental project emphasizes modern interconnectivity and mutual access as well as the modern service economy, which not only represents the latest trend in industrial development in China, but is also a major content of the Belt and Road Initiative, said Koh Chin Yee, CEO of the Longus Research Institute in Singapore.

Through a joint project of such a scale, China and Singapore have placed their bilateral cooperation within a great framework that enables Singapore to have an opportunity to participate in the development of central and western China, said Gu Qingyang, associate professor of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at National University of Singapore.

The two countries agreed to promote the use of the renminbi (RMB) in bilateral trade and investment, improve the use of the RMB clearing bank in Singapore, and steadily advance cross-border RMB business, according to a joint statement issued at the end of Xi's visit.

As a predominantly ethnic Chinese society, Singapore shares cultural roots with China and maintains close relations with China. During his visit, Xi described the China-Singapore relationship as a partnership of all-round cooperation in keeping with the times.

Based on general trends, China-Singapore economic and trade cooperation has expanded and deepened, said Li Mingjiang, associate professor at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) of Nanyang Technological University.

The economic inter-dependency between China and Singapore has grown deeper and deeper, from investment, trade in the past to service, logistics and the knowledge-base economy today, he said. Endi