ASEAN Secretary-General expects wider product availability across region under FTA upgrade

ASEAN secretary-general Kao Kim Hourn said he looks forward to seeing a broader range of product availability in both China and the Southeast Asian region following the recent upgrading of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (FTA).

At the 27th ASEAN-China Summit held in Vientiane, Laos on Thursday, the parties announced they had agreed to the FTA to to Version 3.0, providing an institutional guarantee for the two sides to jointly build a hyper-scale market, a significant step toward leading economic integration in East Asia.

In an interview with China Central Television (CCTV), Kao said this upgrade will promote mutually beneficial cooperation between ASEAN and China in various fields.

"Well, after almost two years of negotiations, both sides, ASEAN and China, have already reached substantial outcomes on the negotiation for the upgrade of ASEAN-China FTA 3.0. So this is a very substantial outcome. This will be a major contribution to the economic cooperation between ASEAN and China because ASEAN and China are the largest trade partner of each other. So we expect with the upgrade, we hope that trade, investment and tourism will continue to increase even more. And I think that would be a positive and major development and transformation between ASEAN and China in terms of working together in the area of economic cooperation," he said.

He also expressed expectations that the upgrade will promote trade facilitation and drive cooperation between ASEAN and China in areas such as logistics and the service industry.

"Open trade means that the products will become much more available on both sides. And I think, for example, ASEAN has been exporting a lot of agricultural products to China. And with this upgrade, we will see more flows of goods on both sides, goods and services. So this is the kind of thing we hope to see. At the same time, of course, we want to see more cooperation in the tourism sector, we want to see more investment from both sides," he said.

China and ASEAN, together accounting for a quarter of the world's population, have been each other's largest trading partners in the last four years. In 2023, China's investment in ASEAN increased by as much as 44.6 percent, while accumulated two-way investment between China and ASEAN countries has surpassed 380 billion U.S. dollars.

ASEAN Secretary-General expects wider product availability across region under FTA upgrade

World's largest 26-megawatt offshore wind turbine has been unveiled in east China's Fujian Province on Saturday, a fully domestically designed and manufactured unit which symbolizes a milestone achievement in the country's green energy development.

The 26-megawatt offshore wind turbine boasts remarkable dimensions. Its hub center is 185 meters high, equivalent to a 63-story residential building. The designed rotor diameter exceeds 310 meters, with a swept area exceeding 10 standard football fields, making it the largest turbine globally in terms of both capacity and size.

One of the key achievements of this project is the fully localized design and manufacturing.

"We have overcome the bottleneck of relying on imported bearings for direct-drive systems. We have achieved complete independence and control in both bearings' control systems and the supporting components. Whether in terms of technical specifications or efficiency and reliability, we are at the forefront of the world," said Wang Jun, vice general manager of the Dongfang Electric Corporation, the manufacturer.

The turbine is designed specifically for medium- to high-wind-speed offshore areas. With an average wind speed of 10 meters per second, a single unit can generate 100 million kilowatt-hours of clean energy annually.

With high efficiency, this turbine is enough to power 55,000 households for a year, saving more than 30,000 tons of standard coal and cutting carbon dioxide emissions by over 80,000 tons.

"In a 500-megawatt offshore wind project, using a 26-megawatt turbine compared to an 18-megawatt turbine would reduce the total number of turbines by over 30 percent and lower the cost per kilowatt-hour by more than 10 percent. This offers strong equipment support for achieving cost parity in offshore wind power," said Wang.

China completes building world’s largest 26-MW offshore wind turbine