Beijing announced on Wednesday it will conduct joint military drills with Singapore in a bid to strengthen defence capabilities with Southeast Asian neighbours. China’s Defence Ministry said in a short statement the drills with the Singapore Navy would involve search and rescue operations along with communication exercises. The exercise was “a consensus reached by the two navies, aimed at enhancing mutual trust, deepening friendship, promoting cooperation, and jointly promoting the construction of a maritime community with a shared future,” Chinese naval spokesperson Gao Xiucheng said in a statement. Both parties also agreed to increase the scope and scale of current bilateral exercises, the report added. “Even if China is keen to engage in more intense defence diplomacy, the Southeast Asian partners have to be similarly willing and enthused about it. Much of the governments’ attention has been on pandemic control – for which their militaries are also quite heavily involved in routine day-to-day operations, especially border security – which has consequently reduced their bandwidth to engage in as much defence diplomacy as they would have desired,” Dr Collin Koh, maritime security analyst for RSIS said in a statement as quoted by the SCMP. But Koh noted the joint China-Singapore exercises were a sign Beijing aimed to consolidate ties with Southeast Asia.