Cooperation urged

Considering the economic woes in Europe and the U.S. and their impact on Asian exports, China and ASEAN should look for alternative sources of growth and further increase trade within the region, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak said Friday at the eighth China-ASEAN Expo, which was held along with the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit in Nanning from Oct. 21 to 26.

There is still huge room for trade growth, he said, noting that China and ASEAN aim to boost annual bilateral trade volume to 500 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.

ASEAN has embarked on a right path of opening up to and closely cooperating with China, whose stability and development is crucial to the region's growth, said Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen at the investment summit on Friday.

He called for the completion of a railway project intended to connect Kunming in southwest China and Singapore, which will enhance the interconnection in the China-ASEAN region.

China and ASEAN will work together to build ASEAN into an economic community by 2015, he said.

China has set up a 10 billion-U.S. dollar China-ASEAN Fund on Investment Cooperation and pledged 15 billion U.S. dollars of loans to ASEAN countries to support infrastructure projects in the China-ASEAN region and to enhance economic ties.

Hun Sen also called for lowering non-tariff trade barriers such as quarantine requirements to help more farm produce from less-developed ASEAN member states enter the Chinese market.

Despite a huge surplus in its total national trade, China registered a trade deficit of 16.3 billion U.S. dollars with ASEAN in 2010, up by more than 30 times from the previous year, with its imports from ASEAN rising faster than exports to the bloc.

China's huge market will attract more investment by companies from ASEAN countries, said Nguyen The Nhan, sales manager of a Vietnamese scale company subsidiary in Dongxing City.

Investment and operation will definitely be affected if trade protectionist sentiments rise, said Nhan, whose Nhon Hoa Scale DongXing Co., Ltd. produces over 1.8 million spring scales annually and sells them all in China.

Wen said Friday China and ASEAN "will rise above political, economic, religious, cultural and other differences ... and move our cooperation forward toward common prosperity," as long as they act in the spirit of equality, mutual trust and seek common ground while shelving differences.

Incidents like the death of the Chinese sailors on the Mekong River will not impact the China-ASEAN economic cooperation, said Danny Chian Siong Lee, community affairs development director of the ASEAN's Corporate and Community Affairs Department.

Governments in the China-ASEAN region firmly agree to the importance of regional stability and growth, he said, while calling for more people-to-people exchanges to avoid public misgivings.

"We want good relations, peace and stability, which will lead to prosperity for everyone ... Regional conflict is not doing anyone any good," he said.