China's Ministry of Commerce formally announced on September 1 that two-way trade between China and ASEAN surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025, reaching $1.05 trillion, up 7.4 percent year on year. It was a milestone year for China-ASEAN economic relations: bilateral trade crossed the trillion-dollar mark for the first time, marking a new stage in the development of this regional economic partnership and another key milestone in more than three decades of deepening economic and trade cooperation between the two sides.

The ministry also disclosed that China has remained ASEAN's largest trading partner for 17 consecutive years, while ASEAN has been China's largest trading partner for six consecutive years, making each other one of their most important economic partners. Viewed over a longer horizon, China-ASEAN trade started at roughly $105 billion in 2004 and grew over two decades to nearly $989.9 billion by 2024, before crossing the trillion-dollar threshold in 2025 — a nearly tenfold increase over twenty years that underscores the long-term trend of deepening trade ties and expanding trade scale between the two sides.

Heading into 2026, bilateral trade has kept up its strong momentum. Ministry of Commerce data show total China-ASEAN trade reached $744.41 billion in the first seven months of the year, a sharp 24.7 percent year-on-year increase, raising ASEAN's share of China's total foreign trade to 21.8 percent; measured in yuan terms, trade over the first eight months reached 5.95 trillion yuan (about $886 billion), up 20.6 percent year on year. The figures suggest China-ASEAN trade growth has further accelerated in 2026 compared with 2025, with bilateral economic cooperation expanding at a faster pace.

Behind the rapid growth in bilateral trade lies the institutional dividend from the continued deepening and upgrading of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area. On October 28, 2025, China and ASEAN formally signed the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area 3.0 Upgrade Protocol in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, adding five new areas — digital economy, green economy, supply chain connectivity, competition policy and consumer protection, and cooperation on micro, small and medium enterprises — to the existing framework, expanding the free trade area's coverage to nine areas in total. At the same time, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which groups the ten ASEAN countries together with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, continues to be implemented at a high standard across the region, with tariff reductions and cumulative rules of origin steadily unlocking further institutional benefits that provide a solid foundation for bilateral trade growth.

At the corporate level, these institutional dividends have translated into concrete export gains. Ruijie Networks Co, a Fuzhou, Fujian-based maker of switches, routers and data-center network security equipment, saw its exports to ASEAN markets surge 93 percent year on year to 1.44 billion yuan in the first eight months of this year — a snapshot of how Chinese electronics and IT manufacturers are benefiting from deepening China-ASEAN economic cooperation. Similar export gains have also appeared broadly across China's competitive industries exporting to ASEAN, including new-energy vehicles, photovoltaic modules and home appliances.

2026 marks the fifth anniversary of the China-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and the opening year of the China-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Action Plan (2026-2030), giving bilateral economic cooperation added political and strategic significance. From September 17 to 21, the 23rd China-ASEAN Expo was held in Nanning, Guangxi, under the theme "Sharing 3.0 Opportunities, Building a Better Life Together," focusing on the new opportunities created by the FTA 3.0 Upgrade Protocol and serving as an important window for observing the latest developments in China-ASEAN economic cooperation.

In terms of industrial structure, China and ASEAN economies are highly complementary: China holds advantages in manufacturing, infrastructure construction, digital technology and new-energy industries, while ASEAN countries have comparative advantages in natural resources, labor costs and agricultural supply — a deep interlocking of industrial and supply chains that forms an important basis for continued trade growth. Analysts note that RCEP covers roughly 2.3 billion people and about 30 percent of global economic output, making it the most populous free trade area in the world today; its high-quality implementation has further lowered trade and investment costs for regional businesses and encouraged coordinated regional industrial-chain layouts.

Alongside trade growth, two-way investment and cooperation in agricultural goods and cross-border e-commerce between China and ASEAN have also been expanding. According to Ministry of Commerce data, cumulative two-way investment between China and ASEAN had exceeded $515 billion as of July 2026, with Chinese firms continuing to increase investment in ASEAN manufacturing, infrastructure and new-energy sectors, while ASEAN capital has also been accelerating its entry into the Chinese market. In agricultural trade, ASEAN has for several consecutive years been one of China's largest agricultural trading partners, with tropical fruits such as durian and longan exported from Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia proving highly popular with Chinese consumers. Meanwhile, cross-border e-commerce trade between China and ASEAN has grown more than 20 percent a year on average, with platforms such as Alibaba International and Lazada helping specialty goods like durian and bird's nest achieve traceability to their place of origin and digital logistics tracking, further narrowing the distance between the two markets.

Against a backdrop of rising global trade protectionism and tariff increases by some economies, China-ASEAN trade surpassing $1 trillion is also being cited as a notable example of regional economic integration hedging against external uncertainty. Even so, some analysts point out that as bilateral trade expands, concerns persist among certain ASEAN member states' domestic industries over trade imbalances with China and competitive pressure in some sectors; regional security issues such as the South China Sea are also seen by some commentators as a backdrop that will need continued management as China-ASEAN economic cooperation deepens.

Looking ahead, as the FTA 3.0 Upgrade Protocol is implemented across emerging areas such as the digital and green economies, and as measures under the China-ASEAN Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Action Plan (2026-2030) are rolled out, bilateral economic cooperation is expected to expand further beyond traditional trade in goods and investment liberalization into digital economy, green economy and standardization. Several institutions forecast that China-ASEAN trade volume will likely continue growing in the coming years, with regional economic integration deepening further and providing a more stable pillar of support for growth across the Asia-Pacific and the wider global economy.