As leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China will gather here on Thursday for an annual meeting on the sidelines of an ASEAN summit, they are ushering in a new era in their dynamic cooperation of mutual benefit.

China and the 10-member ASEAN have labeled the past 10 years a “golden decade” for their relationship since 2003 when they forged a strategic partnership and have dubbed the next 10 years a ” diamond decade,” which both sides hope will feature more practical cooperation and regional economic integration.

China is the largest trading partner of ASEAN while ASEAN has emerged as China’s third largest. Two-way trade amounted to 443.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2013, nearly six-fold that of 2003. In the first three quarters of this year, the figure reached 346.6 billion U.S. dollars, a 7.5-percent increase year-on-year.

…Kaewkamol Pitakdumrongkit, an assistant professor at Singapore’ s Nanyang Technological University, believed that the China-ASEAN cooperation has been doing well, such as the sub-regional development.

“China has funded much of the sub-regional development project like the Mekong,” he said, referring to the 4,880-km Mekong river which flows from China to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.