China's APEC 2026 Agenda: Priorities, Timeline and Implications for Australia

Importantly also, if President Xi proceeds to take up President Trump’s invitation to visit America in September, APEC will mark the third in-person meeting between the two leaders in 2026. A fourth meeting may then follow at the G20 Leader’s summit in Florida in December. This unusually dense schedule of US-China leader-level meetings underscores the prospect of 2026 becoming a pivotal year for international diplomacy and decision-making.

Agenda by sub-theme: Openness, Innovation and Cooperation

Openness

The concept of openness has been a defining principle of APEC since its establishment in 1989, and notably within a context of trade and regional economic integration. Almost four decades later, however, the very industrial transformation and redistribution of economic activity that openness has brought have also produced a backlash against globalisation in some countries. Hence, in contrast to APEC’s earlier promotion and realisation of regional and global supply chains and tariff reductions, today the international trading environment is increasingly characterised by declining trust, pressures to reshore production, impose export controls, and raising of tariffs, particularly between China and the US.

Towards goals of continued trade openness and economic integration, it appears that China’s APEC agenda for 2026 has significant emphasis on fostering trade facilitation. Key mechanisms supporting this objective include advancing the digital economy through initiatives such as paperless customs procedures, electronic trade documentation, interoperable digital systems, AI cooperation and cross-border e-commerce frameworks. It is understood that there is an investment promotion agenda that equivalently seeks to simplify investment-related processes, with particular emphasis on facilitating investment in advanced manufacturing and low-carbon supply chains.

Innovation

The innovation sub-theme reflects that APEC 2026 is being held during a period of profound industrial and technological transformation. Against that backdrop, the agenda places notable emphasis on the digital economy, including AI and digitally enabled commerce. It reflects the view that future economic growth will increasingly be driven and enabled by technological capability rather than traditional trade liberalisation alone.

Cooperation

Cooperation is an enabler for both “openness” and “innovation”, and in this year’s APEC, it is given added prominence amid growing geoeconomic tensions and strategic rivalry. China’s framing of cooperation draws heavily on APEC’s tradition of consensus-building – toward openness and shared prosperity – and implicitly takes cooperation as an ongoing default, and geoeconomic tension and rivalries as the exception. Beyond broader emphasis on shared challenges, such as those relating to energy and the environment, one aspect of economic cooperation being fostered is to elevate the digital integration of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into global trade networks.

Given the precarious geoeconomic context, and the fundamental importance of the technological zeitgeist, APEC’s higher-income and larger economies have added their voice to potential policy directions in areas of digital cooperation and trade facilitation. Table 2 summarises key initiatives together with the nations that are leading them.