Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong flew into Nanning on May 18, accompanied by officials from the ministries of finance, foreign affairs, digital development, and manpower, for a visit that was described in media reports as an effort to “deepen Singapore’s ties with China at the regional level.”
In addition to meeting Guangxi Communist Party chief Chen Gang, Lee made site visits to Nanning, the southern gateway of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor (ILSTC). The ILSTC is a multimodal freight corridor, spanning rail, road, and sea, and running from Chongqing in western China southwest through Guangxi to Qinzhou Port on the Beibu Gulf, then by container ship to Singapore and onward to ASEAN and global markets.
Thirteen provincial-level regions in western China, including Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, and Xinjiang, are participating in ILSTC alongside Singapore, which serves as the transshipment hub at the corridor’s southern end. The institutional anchor of the ILSTC is the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Connectivity Initiative (CCI), Singapore’s third government-to-government project with China, under which Singapore and Chongqing serve as the corridor’s dual hubs.
