Apec will return to China in 2026 (with guarantees on Taiwan's presence)

Xi Jinping's announcement at the Lima summit. The Asia Pacific Economic Forum is one of the few international bodies where both Beijing and Taipei are present. Xi Jinping aims to establish himself as the pivot of Pacific trade against the threat of protectionism with Trump's return.

Lima (AsiaNews/Agencies) - The People's Republic of China will once again host the 2026 summit of Apec, the economic cooperation body that brings together 21 countries from Asia, America and Oceania bordering the Pacific Ocean.

This was announced on 16 November by the Chinese President Xi Jinping himself during his speech at the annual meeting that closed yesterday in Lima, Peru, and the news was officially confirmed in the Machu Picchu Declaration, circulated at the end of the meeting.

After the 2025 meeting - already scheduled to take place in Gyeongju, South Korea - China will host the summit for the third time, following the previous summits in 2001 (on the eve of the People's Republic's entry into the WTO) and 2014. An assignment that Xi strongly wanted in order to relaunch Beijing's ambitions in trade between the two sides of the Pacific.

However, in order to obtain the necessary consensus of all member countries, China had to offer new reassurances on the participation of the Taiwanese delegation, after the increasingly harsh threats against its leadership and the entry into force in June in the People's Republic of new legal ‘guidelines’ that even threaten the death penalty for the ‘diehard’ supporters of the independence of the ‘rebel island’.

Taiwan is in fact one of the member countries of Apec: it joined in 1991 together with the People's Republic of China. In the name of the ‘One China policy’ at the summit, the island participates as ‘Chinese Taipei’.

In recent years, it had been Morris Chang, the founder of Tmsc (the Taipei company that is the global giant in semiconductor production); this year, President William Lai Ching-te sent another entrepreneur, Lin Hsin-i, to Lima instead.

As an economic forum, Apec is one of the few international fora where both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan participate and where officials from both sides can interact, if only to exchange pleasantries. Lin Hsin-i reportedly gave an unspecified nod of greeting to Chinese President Xi Jinping, without any handshake or conversation.

According to Taipei's national security sources told local media, when the allocation to China was discussed at the Apec table, concerns about the equal treatment of member countries and the protection of personal security were raised ‘by several delegations’. Issues on which Beijing is said to have provided reassurances, which is why Taiwan should also be presented at the Chinese summit.

China's push to host the largest free trade forum in the Pacific should also be read within the clash on tariffs with the United States and Europe, and the new tensions linked to the further protectionist squeeze promised in Donald Trump's election campaign.

About the relationship between Washington and Beijing, right on the sidelines of the Apec summit, Xi Jinping and outgoing President Joe Biden spoke in Lima in their last bilateral meeting. ‘China is ready to work with the new US administration to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences,’ Xi said during the talk.