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China-ASEAN AI Cooperation Case Collection Unveiled in Nanning, Spotlighting 31 Projects Across All of ASEAN
Reporter 欧亚时报编辑部
On September 17, at the plenary session of the 23rd China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit and the China-ASEAN Business Leaders Forum in Nanning, Guangxi, the report "Smart Link Across Land and Sea: A Collection of China-ASEAN AI International Cooperation Cases (2026)" was formally released. It marked the first time China-ASEAN cooperation in artificial intelligence has been systematically compiled and showcased in the form of a dedicated case collection, coinciding with the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo held alongside it and forming a key deliverable under this year's expo theme, "Sharing 3.0 Opportunities, Building a Better Life Together" — and, following the FTA 3.0 Upgrade Protocol's addition of digital-economy cooperation, another concrete step forward in the specific, emerging field of artificial intelligence.
The collection was jointly compiled by the Secretariat of the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit, the Joint Secretariat of the China-ASEAN Business Council, and the Research Institute of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT). It brings together 31 representative cooperation cases across eight fields — new infrastructure, intelligent manufacturing, smart logistics, smart agriculture, smart healthcare, smart cities, smart education and smart finance — achieving full coverage of all eleven ASEAN member states. The compilers said the selection process focused on actual practice in the international business community, aiming to present a concrete picture of China-ASEAN AI cooperation and its practical results rather than broad policy statements.
Analysis in the collection shows China-ASEAN AI cooperation displays three main features: first, it responds to real needs, with cooperation scenarios focused on concrete industry pain points; second, it emphasizes capacity building, with cooperation models taking diverse forms such as training, joint laboratories and technology transfer; and third, policy and institutional coordination is becoming clearer, reflecting how AI cooperation between the two sides is moving from early, scattered, one-off projects toward a new stage of institutionalized, regularized and systematic development.
One project included in the collection is a bilingual AI early epidemic-monitoring platform deployed jointly by the disease control authorities of Chongzuo, a Guangxi border city, and neighboring Vietnamese provinces. The platform uses AI to analyze epidemiological information from the border area in real time, compressing the four hours traditionally needed for manual reporting to under 30 minutes, significantly improving early warning and response for cross-border public-health risks — held up as a representative case of AI-enabled cross-border public-health cooperation.
Another notable case is a solar-monitoring platform developed by a company in Nanning, which uses drones and AI to remotely monitor nearly 3,000 photovoltaic sites in Malaysia with a combined installed capacity of almost 300 megawatts. By replacing traditional manual inspections with drones and AI algorithms, the platform has boosted maintenance efficiency by more than 30 percent while cutting labor costs by over 20 percent, offering a replicable technical solution for the smart operation and maintenance of clean-energy infrastructure in ASEAN countries.
In agriculture, a smart-farming platform developed by a Guangxi-based company has been deployed in Laos and Cambodia, combining satellite remote-sensing imagery, drone aerial photography and ground-sensor data to monitor pests and diseases affecting tropical crops and guide cultivation management. The platform has now been tested on more than 20,000 mu (roughly 1,300 hectares) of farmland, serving as a further practical example of AI helping improve the quality and efficiency of agriculture in ASEAN countries.
On the broader institutional front, China's Ministry of Science and Technology released the Three-Year Action Plan (2025-2027) for AI-Enabled Development Cooperation for ASEAN in September 2025, explicitly calling for building an innovative China-ASEAN AI cooperation ecosystem covering capacity building, talent exchange and joint laboratory construction. Guangxi's China-ASEAN Artificial Intelligence Application Cooperation Center has so far catalogued more than 1,000 potential AI application scenarios, of which 279 have moved into actual deployment — providing a continuing pipeline of projects for cooperation between the two sides.
Participants at the forum broadly agreed that China and ASEAN, linked by geography and complementary in their industrial structures, have a solid foundation for deepening AI cooperation, and that 2026 — the fifth anniversary of the China-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership — made the release of the case collection all the more resonant with this milestone. Myanmar Vice President U Nyo Saw, who attended the opening ceremony of the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo and China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit on September 17, said in his remarks that artificial intelligence would become a key element of future global economic development, and that Myanmar would actively adopt AI technology to help tap new business opportunities; Vietnam's Standing Deputy Prime Minister, Laos's Standing Deputy Prime Minister and ASEAN Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn also attended and spoke at the opening ceremony.
Echoing the release of the case collection, this year's China-ASEAN Expo also featured an "AI marketplace" zone for the first time, bringing together roughly 500 products from more than 70 companies across eight categories, including wearable devices, health management and consumer electronics, with visitors able to try out and directly purchase items on site. It was seen as a concrete step in pushing China-ASEAN AI cooperation beyond policy documents and case studies and into the consumer market. Several participating company representatives said the case collection, paired with the dedicated exhibition zone, should help improve matchmaking between ASEAN businesses and Chinese AI firms, building up more practical experience to support future project implementation.
Analysts note that the release of the case collection echoes a series of other recent developments, including China-ASEAN trade surpassing $1 trillion for the first time and the FTA 3.0 Upgrade Protocol's addition of digital-economy cooperation, together sketching a clear trajectory of bilateral economic cooperation accelerating its expansion from traditional trade in goods into emerging fields such as the digital economy and artificial intelligence, with AI expected to become one of the new growth points in China-ASEAN cooperation.
Some observers caution, however, that the ten ASEAN countries already differ considerably in their levels of economic development, digital infrastructure and talent pools, and correspondingly vary in their AI infrastructure, data-governance rules and technical talent reserves, with governance questions such as cross-border data flows and privacy protection still needing to be coordinated; how to avoid the benefits of cooperation becoming overly concentrated in a handful of economies is another concern some have raised. At the same time, global competition among major powers over AI technical standards and ecosystems is intensifying, and how effectively the case collection's projects are actually implemented — and how sustainable they prove to be — will need to be tested further in practice going forward.
