Eric's Insight: China-Cambodia ties hold promising prospect

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with visiting Prime Minister of Cambodia Hun Sen on February 10 in Beijing, marking the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the bilateral relations and opening a new era of building a China-Cambodia community with a shared future.

65 years of political trust, economic cooperation

The China-Cambodia relations have been cooperative and mutually-beneficial since the very beginning. In July 1958, China and Cambodia formally established diplomatic relations, which were further improved in the 1960s. The leaders of the two countries visited each other frequently, and China assisted Cambodia in nation building and development.

In turbulent years of the 1970s and 1980s, Norodom Sihanouk and other Cambodian statesmen maintained close contacts with China, and the government led by Prince Sihanouk won bulks of support and assistance from Beijing. With a high degree of political mutual trust, the two sides helped each other in international affairs.

Following the end of the Cold War, the China-Cambodia relations largely kept the fine tradition of frequent high-level visits, while economic cooperation has been on the rise. In the 1990s, the Cambodian leaders of Sihanouk and Hun Sen each visited China three times, and bilateral trade increased from USD 13 million in 1992 to USD 276 million in 2002.

In 2006, the two countries raised their bilateral relations to the level of "comprehensive partnership of cooperation", which was further upgraded to a "comprehensive strategic partnership" in 2010. When the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed by China in 2013, Cambodia was among the first countries to endorse it.

As oriental China moves to the center of the international stage, occidental powers led by the US get increasingly restless and began to use the South China Sea issue as a means to contain China in recent years. In the challenging context, it was Cambodia who stood out in support of China. Given the influence of the US and its allies in the region, the Cambodian political support for China should be more than cherished.

In 2016, Cambodia and China signed a memorandum of understanding on the formulation of a cooperation plan to jointly build the Belt and Road Initiative, and in 2019, the two sides signed the Action Plan 2019-23 for Building a China-Cambodia community of shared future. With a sense of community and responsibility, the branch of Fuwai Cardiovascular Hospital in southwest China’s Yunnan province offered free treatment to around 90 Cambodian children with congenital heart disease.

When Chinese Wuhan was hit by Covid outbreaks in the wake of 2020 and certain countries were in a hurry to ask their nationals to leave China, prime minister Hun Sen braved the snowstorm to Beijing and showed the Cambodian solidarity with China. Meanwhile, Yunnan province also received 5,021 masks donated by the Cambodian families, whose kids with the congenital heart disease enjoyed free surgeries at Fuwai hospital. What moving scenes in China-Cambodia ties!

Since the China-Cambodia free trade agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership came into effect in January last year, trade between both countries has been further liberalized. With bilateral trade volume hitting a record high of 16.02 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, China has been Cambodia's largest trading partner for 11 consecutive years.

And the year 2022 also saw frequent high-level exchanges: King Norodom Sihamoni attended the Beijing Winter Olympics; President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Hun Sen spoke on the phone; Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe visited Cambodia in succession.

Ky Sereyvath, director-general of the Institute of China Studies at the Royal Academy of Cambodia, said bilateral ties have withstood the test of regional and international vicissitudes and have become even closer since Cambodia and China forged diplomatic ties in 1958, adding "the fraternal relationship should serve as a role model of country-to-country relations."

Statement outlines shared future for China, Cambodia

Following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with visiting Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, China and Cambodia released a joint statement on building a China-Cambodia community with a shared future in the new era, prioritizing the six areas of political cooperation, production capacity, agriculture, energy, security and people-to-people exchanges.

The joint statement said both sides agreed to deepen strategic synergy and cooperation between the Belt and Road Initiative and the Rectangular Strategies, ensuring safety of the projects and personnel, and according a greater role to China-Cambodia Working Mechanism for Production Capacity and Investment Cooperation.

"High-quality, high-level and high-standard are used to describe the goal of building the China and Cambodia partnership, and the joint statement has a guiding role and provides practical guidance for the two countries on how to achieve this goal," observed Ge Hongliang, director of the China-ASEAN Maritime Security Research Center at Guangxi Minzu University.

In particular, the statement noted China supports Cambodia in the preliminary work of railway planning, design, and feasibility studies to promote railway construction and projects benefiting people’s livelihood along the railway. Both sides look forward to early railway connection between Cambodia and China-Laos-Thailand Railway.

As the Chinese province that is most adjacent to Cambodia, Yunnan should make full use of its favorable location and play a key role in on-land connectivity with Cambodia. Given the province has been connected with Laos by rail, and the China-Laos-Thailand round-trip train was launched earlier this month from the provincial capital of Kunming, the prospect for China-Cambodia railway looks bright.

Also, Yunnan is proud of its green food like tea and coffee, and it is a favored destination for international students from Cambodia, so the province can contribute a lot to the future China-Cambodia cooperation in agriculture and people-to-people exchanges.

Having watched the recently-popular Chinese TV play Meet Yourself, Tim Chivorn, a Cambodian student majoring in electrical engineering and automation in Yunnan’s Kunming University of Science and Technology, took a bullet train to Dali Bai autonomous prefecture on February 13, visiting in person the sites where the typical scenes were shot.

In October last year, Tim returned to Kunming to continue his career of studying in China and began to serve as the vice president of the Cambodian Students' Union in Yunnan. “We’re working hard to allow more Cambodian talents to study in China, hoping to contribute our youthful strength to the building of a China-Cambodia community with a shared future in the new era,” said Tim.

"The China-Cambodia agricultural cooperation can start with agricultural training and people-to-people exchanges, so as to provide talent support for Cambodian agricultural development," said Zhao Shulan, deputy director of the International Academic Exchange Center of Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, during a recent online forum. Zhao added the majors by Cambodian students in China are diverse, hoping more Cambodians in Yunnan will choose to major agriculture.

Joseph Matthews, a senior professor at the BELTEI International University in Phnom Penh, said the close and special relationship between Cambodia and China is characterized by deep historical feelings. "With high commitment and efforts made by the leaders and people of the two countries, I believe that the construction of the Cambodia-China community with a shared future will become a reality," Matthews said.

(The writer Eric Wang Shixue is an English editor with the Mekong News Network based in Kunming, Yunnan province. The view in the article does not necessarily represent that of Yunnan Gateway.)