Indian Council of World Affairs

The significance of the first ASEAN-GCC-China Summit, held on 27 May 2025, in Kuala Lumpur, is to be seen as the participants hedging their positions given the unpredictability of the existing global order. 

The first Summit-level meeting between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), better known as the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the People’s Republic of China was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 27 May 2025. This Summit has been in the making since November 2024, when the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, who is also the incumbent Chair of ASEAN, on the sidelines of the China International Import Expo in Shanghai, said as much while adding that Beijing’s participation would be ‘of great consequence to the trajectory of regional growth’.[i]

Independent of what Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has said, both ASEAN and GCC have been deepening their partnership with China at an institutional level. As a prelude to the May engagement, the first meeting between GCC and China, known as the China-Arab States Summit, was held in December 2022,[ii] and a similar level of engagement between ASEAN and GCC was held in Riyadh in October 2023.[iii]  

At the outset, this engagement may not appear to be significant at first glance, given the multiplicity of platforms like the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the East Asian Summit, to name a few, are being curated under the aegis of the Southeast Asian forum. However, the significance of this engagement is to be seen in the changing contours of the global landscape wherein the participants are hedging their positions given the unpredictability of the future.

Not Just a pro forma of a Joint Statement

While the Joint Statement[iv] that came out at the end of the Summit did cover a wide and generic canvas, it did make specific reference to the ongoing challenges in West Asia, or as the signatories would like to call it, the Middle East. The statement noted existing international norms and legal mechanisms regarding the humanitarian cost of Israel's actions in Gaza, while also calling for the establishment of a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders in the region.

However, other issues that are of mutual interest to the members of ASEAN, GCC, and China were on a diverse range of subjects like trade and investment, connectivity, energy security, sustainability, and digital transformation, among others. While these issues have now become a common facet of almost all international communiqué, what makes this Joint Statement important is the context in which it has been made.

On economic cooperation, the three sides did see the need to prioritise the timely realisation of the Global Development Initiative between ASEAN and GCC, as well as an early conclusion of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area 3.0 Upgrade negotiations and the China-GCC Free Trade Agreement negotiations. The cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was not only viewed as an instrument of seamless connectivity but also as an integral part of developing logistics corridors and digital platforms. At the same time, BRI was seen as “promoting sustainable infrastructure development in supporting interconnected and seamless economic diversification, growth and sustainability”. On energy cooperation, all three, in principle, will work “towards sustainable, just, affordable, inclusive and orderly energy transitions in line with the Paris Agreement” while working to diversify and secure supply chains globally, including critical energy transition minerals. 

The Joint Statement also emphasised the “indispensable role of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the core of the rules-based multilateral trading system, which provides a predictable, transparent, non-discriminatory and open global trading system”. This was followed by the realisation of “supply chain resilience and fostering sustainable trade practices for new economic opportunities in potential areas in emerging and future-oriented industries, such as the digital and green economy and technologies”. The three sides would also be exploring the prospects of cross-border payments in their respective local currencies.

Shifting Sands of Geopolitical Posturing

While the Summit at the outset can be seen as a plurilateral engagement when the international order is otherwise in a phase of transition, the Summit is also to be seen as one of hedging, especially by ASEAN and GCC. This is evident from the issues that have been flagged as areas of cooperation, as identified in the Joint Statement.

The first is the specific reference to the WTO, a global body along with its structures, which until recently, was the bedrock of all international trade-related engagement and is presently in a deadlock. Ironically, the call for a ‘rules-based multilateral order, which provides a predictable, transparent, non-discriminatory and open global system’ until recently was solely synonymous with the irrationality that was associated with the South China Sea dispute and strictly with one of the participants of this Summit is now used to ridicule the protectionist tendencies that have come to guide the economic outlook of some of the developed countries.

Secondly, the reference to cross-border payment in their respective local currency is inherently to be seen as another pro forma effort by Beijing to internationalise the Renminbi and thus not merit greater scrutiny; the same cannot be said about the reference to supply chain resilience. This is so as the supply chain supply resilience has become a focal point of discussion with respect to international trade and commerce in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein the dependency upon a sole supplier for goods and services is now being seen as a strategic threat. And this, in other words, translated into a China Plus One strategy of diversification. However, owing to the sanction and tariff regime that the West has so dearly come to live by, with no clear endgame in sight, this Summit seems to be laying the foundation for an alternative economic model. This is because supply chain resilience now seems to be interpreted not as access to a steady and uninterrupted flow of goods and services, but also denotes unrestricted access to markets along with price and tariff stability.

Given this backdrop, the Joint Statement is to be seen as symptomatic of the unpredictability of the global economic order that had been nurtured by the West over the past many decades and its inability to adapt to the shifts in the global power dynamic. The steady shift of the global economic fulcrum from a trans-Atlantic to an Indo-Pacific one has now brought to play a number of new actors, especially in the Asian region, who are now in a position to play an assertive role, irrespective of their respective limitations. Thus, the salience of the ASEAN-GCC-China is to be judged not necessarily by its outcomes, but by the signalling of a potential realignment of interests.

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*Dr. Sripathi Narayanan, Research Fellow, Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA)
Disclaimer: The views expressed are personal

Endnotes

[i] ‘Great consequence’: Malaysia invites China to join Asean summit with Gulf bloc, South China Sea Morning Post, November 5, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3285297/great-consequence-malaysia-invites-china-join-asean-summit-gulf-bloc, accessed on June 10, 2025.

[ii] Chinese premier calls for acceleration of FTA negotiation with GCC, The State Council, People’s Republic of China, September 11, 2024,  https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202409/11/content_WS66e18165c6d0868f4e8ead6c.html, accessed on June 10, 2025. 

[iii] Joint Statement Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Riyadh, asean.org, October 20, 2023, https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/FINAL-ASEAN-GCC-Summit-JS.pdf, accessed on June 10, 2025.

[iv] Joint Statement Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), and The People’s Republic of China (ASEANGC-China Summit), asean.org,  May 27, 2025, https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Final-Joint-Statement-of-the-ASEAN-GCC-China-Summit-27-May-2025.pdf, accessed on June 10, 2025.