The measures on building an open Asia-Pacific community and strengthening supply chain resilience taken by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) under China's leadership will affect everyone amid the persistent global uncertainties, a senior APEC official said.
The Asia-Pacific region, home to one third of the world's population and accounting for over 60 percent of global economic output and nearly half of global trade, remains the world's most dynamic economic zone.
However, the ongoing international tensions, particularly the negative impact of the Middle East conflicts, have continued to challenge the region's economies in 2026.
According to the International Monetary Fund's regional economic outlook for Asia-Pacific released last month, economic growth in Asia is projected to slow down from five percent in 2025 to 4.4 percent in 2026.
Against the backdrop, China's proposed 2026 APEC theme, "Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together," has gained broad recognition.
On the sidelines of the Second Senior Officials' Meeting of APEC China 2026, held in Shanghai from Monday to Tuesday, Eduardo Pedrosa, executive director of the APEC Secretariat, said a broad consensus had emerged across various meetings that all parties must work together to face challenges.
"I think a lot of the concerns that have been expressed in these meetings are to ensure that we actually overcome together these challenges. A community really infers that we work together. What a community implies that we do more than just trade with each other, but we actually have a shared common purpose towards achieving that. Initiatives that APEC, under China's leadership, is taking is on an open Asia Pacific community and that includes looking at trade, the free trade area of the Asia Pacific and support for the multilateral trading system. So we've talked a lot about supply chains and how do we ensure resilience that have affected us all," he said.
These efforts are backed by concrete actions from China.
Official data showed that in 2025, China's total import and export value with other APEC economies reached 26.29 trillion yuan (around 3.86 trillion U.S. dollars). Among the 21 APEC member economies, China has already been the largest trading partner for 13 of them.
China-led APEC measures to affect everyone amid persistent global uncertainties: official
