An annual conference that Beijing hopes will become Asia’s leading forum for discussing security issues had its largest-ever attendance this year – but organisers’ reluctance to let delegates discuss some of the key issues affecting the region highlighted the distance it needs to travel to surpass a similar gathering in Singapore.

Key issues such as the growing Sino-US rivalry were scarcely touched on at the main sessions of the two-day Xiangshan Forum, which ended on Friday.

Meanwhile discussion of the long-running territorial dispute in the South China Sea was confined to a plenary session that covered the broader topic of maritime security cooperation.

By contrast both issues are regularly discussed at the IISS Asia Security Summit in Singapore, known as the Shangri-La Dialogue, which Beijing hopes Xiangshan will supplant.

Only one of the military delegates invited to speak at the Xiangshan event – a representative from the Philippines – came from a country embroiled in the South China Sea disputes.

… Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy, a visiting fellow at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said it had been possible to discuss US-China relations on the sidelines of the conference, adding he had been impressed by one seminar on the topic which had been attended by young Chinese military officers and academics.