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Shenzhen, China, where themed landscapes have been installed across major roads ahead of the APEC Economic Leaders' Summit (Chen Jimin/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
The organisation has weathered discord before, but this year leaves little time to bridge the divide before Shenzhen.
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APEC’s modest agendaAPEC’s modest agenda
The 21 members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC (Opens in new window)) are getting ready to conclude another year of modest achievements. The agenda for the upcoming Leaders’ Summit in Shenzhen this month continues to shrink. Participants are also passing up the opportunity to meet up in person.
The reasons for such meagre outcomes are many.
APEC typically struggles with delivering concrete outcomes. The organisation has no negotiating mandate. Instead, members gather in various workstreams across the year to “incubate ideas” in tracks including trade and investment, structural reform, and food security. There is a separate process for finance ministers, and the business community also has a related agenda of activities.
This sprawling agenda has continuously expanded since the launch of APEC in 1989 with 12 members. Every year, the organisation’s annual and rotating host adjusts the agenda to suit their interests. China has been the host for 2026 with the theme (Opens in new window) “Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together,” around the priorities of openness, innovation, and cooperation.
These themes are under more pressure than ever before. The shifts in geopolitics, which Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney described as a “rupture (Opens in new window)” earlier this year, might well have led to even greater engagement within the organisation. After all, if there was ever a moment when incubating ideas mattered, it would be now as all the APEC economies have been buffeted by rapidly changing economic tensions.
The gaps between members remain wide with very limited time to resolve outstanding concerns.
Crucially, other than APEC, there are few venues where the 21 members can regularly gather in a non-binding forum. Government officials should have been eager to lean on APEC as an opportunity to share their experiences with one another amid disruption.
However, the membership of APEC has made this task immeasurably more difficult. In 2026, having China serve as host in an institution that includes the United States and Russia has not been a recipe for success. All three are at odds with one another and geopolitical rivalries that cross many members have made cooperation on even relatively benign topics harder than ever.
APEC has struggled in the past to reach consensus on key outcomes. In 2018, an impasse between China and the US meant that the organisation could not issue a Leaders’ Statement at the end of the year of activities. In 2023, APEC trade ministers also could not reach agreement given disagreements on language used to describe the situation in Ukraine. In 2025, APEC members had to issue a very stripped-down Leaders’ Statement.
Getting an agreement on the Leaders’ Statement for 2026 is also going to be tricky. The gaps between members remain wide with very limited time to resolve outstanding concerns.
First Senior Officials' Meeting for APEC China 2026 was held in Guangzhou in February (APEC 2026)
Achieving consensus is also exacerbated by a chicken-and-egg problem. Key figures, such as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, skipped (Opens in new window) the APEC finance ministers meeting last month in Hong Kong. Such absences can diminish the incentives for other senior officials to attend. Bessent was reported to have said (Opens in new window) that he needs the time to prepare for the next US-China leaders’ summit. Yet missing the talks means that other members will not have the opportunity to connect to a key official from the United States.
Given the economic turbulence caused by American actions in 2026, the APEC meetings represent a rare chance for other members to better understand US intentions and to gain insights in the strategies used by other members to cope with rapid changes in the economic environment. But when high-level figures are absent, this is a missed opportunity for engagement.
APEC members might also be keen to discuss policy responses from China. Yet China has also been making unhelpful changes to APEC processes that support cooperation, such as moving some meetings online, removing certain sideline openings for high-level bilateral meetings, and waiting until very late in the process to confirm the timing of some key events.
Despite being ideally set up to manage trade and economic disruption by encouraging non-binding discussions, APEC has simply struggled.
With limited progress expected by the Leaders’ Summit in mid-November, members are instead already turning to next year when Vietnam takes over as chair. Perhaps a different host in a different year can better deliver the APEC Putrajaya Vision 2040 which pledged (Opens in new window) to achieve an “open, dynamic, resilient, and peaceful Asia-Pacific community for the prosperity of all its people and future generations.”
About the author
Deborah Elms
Dr Deborah Elms is Head of Trade Policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore.
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