About the Author

Former UNESCO Deputy Director-General and former UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Strategic Planning; Honorary Professor, South China University for Technology (SCUT), Guangzhou; Chairman, Advisory Committee, International Center for Creativity and Sustainable Development (ICCSD) under the auspices of UNESCO, Beijing; Visiting Professor, Shandong University for Arts and Design (SUAD), Jinan.

(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the official position of ICCSD)

The 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the geopolitical and economic landscape of the 21st century. Together, they account for a substantial share of the world's population, global trade and economic output, while spanning a vast and strategically important area of the Asia-Pacific region. Its activities and cooperation have implications for trade, economic development, social affairs, science and technology, the environment, culture and strategic issues, all of which are increasingly interconnected. This makes APEC one of the most consequential regional forums for dialogue and cooperation. Cooperation among APEC economies will also need to address emerging challenges, including pandemic preparedness and response, as well as the digital transformation of societies. Greater regional cooperation can contribute to multilateralism, prosperity, sustainable development and, ultimately, greater stability and peace. All this will ultimately benefit other regions and the entire world.

The preparations for the November 2026 APEC Economic Leaders' Week provide an opportunity to reflect on several issues of particular relevance to the diverse economies and communities of the Asia-Pacific region. As the host economy of APEC 2026, China has announced the theme and three priorities that will shape this year's discussions. The official theme for APEC China 2026 will be "Building an Asia-Pacific Community to Prosper Together". Underpinning this main subject, China has identified three overarching pillars:

1. Openness

o Trade liberalization

o Economic integration

o Advancing the proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP)

o Addressing protectionism and trade barriers

2. Innovation

o Digital economy

o Artificial intelligence

o Emerging technologies

o Innovation-driven growth

3. Cooperation

o Regional connectivity

o Sustainable development

o Inclusive growth

o Cross-border policy coordination

Based on official APEC China 2026 statements and ministerial meetings held thus far, likely agenda items may include:

· Expansion of regional trade and investment

· Progress toward an Asia-Pacific free-trade framework (FTAAP)

· Supply-chain resilience

· Digital trade rules

· Artificial intelligence governance and readiness

· Innovation and technology cooperation

· Green and sustainable development

· SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) development

· Transportation and connectivity

· Tourism recovery and people-to-people exchanges

· Inclusive economic growth and development cooperation 

Against the background of the substantive preparations for the APEC 2026 summit in Shenzhen, I will discuss the possible role and impact of innovations like AI and digitalization on inclusive sustainable development and prosperity, as well as culture and the creative economy in the Asia-Pacific community.

Shenzhen was chosen as the Summit host city as it is China's leading technology and innovation hub, home to major technology companies and a centerpiece of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. Shenzhen is also strengthening its position as a cultural and creative hub, with the development of new museums, concert halls, libraries and other cultural facilities. Its combination of technological innovation, openness and growing cultural vitality provides an appropriate setting for discussions on the future of the Asia-Pacific. Sustainable development can be expected to be one of the cross-cutting central themes of APEC 2026, even though it may only be framed and integrated within China's broader three core priorities of Openness, Innovation, and Cooperation.

Five areas are particularly relevant to sustainable development:

1.Green manufacturing and low-carbon industrial transformation;

2.Climate and energy transition and sustainable resource development;

3.Food security and sustainable agriculture advancing innovation-driven approaches to strengthen food system resilience across the region; 

4.Ocean sustainability including sustainable fisheries, aquaculture and marine ecosystem conservation;

5.Intersection of AI and sustainability with sustainable urban development, green industrial innovation, climate modeling and smart energy systems.

Beyond these overarching policy issues, sustainable development will also feature at the accompanying APEC CEO Summit. Business leaders are being encouraged to develop practical, investment-oriented solutions that deliver both growth and environmental outcomes. 

Shenzhen provides a natural setting for all these discussions because it combines:

· Advanced manufacturing

· Clean technology development

· Electric vehicle innovation

· Smart-city deployment

· Artificial intelligence ecosystems.

This makes Shenzhen an ideal venue for demonstrating how economic growth, technological innovation, and sustainability can reinforce each other rather than compete with each other. 

The APEC host city Shenzhen is home to many of China's leading technology and advanced manufacturing and technology companies, which include robotics, industrial AI, smart factories, semiconductor ecosystems, electric vehicles and batteries as well as next-generation telecommunications. The main focus will surely be on the potential evolution of manufacturing competitiveness across the Asia-Pacific region. 

Given Shenzhen's reputation as the "Silicon Valley of China," the 2026 CEO Summit is expected to place greater emphasis on AI, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, venture capital, and the Greater Bay Area innovation ecosystem than most previous APEC CEO Summits. Shenzhen is expected to showcase the Greater Bay Area and its focus on investment opportunities and innovative supply-chain integration as a model for regional economic integration and openness.

APEC has gradually increased its attention to AI through its digital economy initiatives. In 2025, APEC held its first Digital and AI Ministerial Meeting in Incheon, Republic of Korea, where ministers issued a joint statement emphasizing responsible AI innovation, digital connectivity, and the development of a safe, secure, reliable and human-centered digital and AI ecosystem. They emphasize human-centered AI that supports sustainable growth, productivity and investment in skills and education. So rather than regulation like the EU, APEC's approach centers on economic integration, innovation, and capacity building within the Asia-Pacific. AI infrastructure has moved from technical asset to strategic imperative. It is noteworthy that APEC has already launched an AI Initiative for 2026–2030, making AI one of the region's flagship cooperation areas. 

China's core priority of "Innovation" explicitly highlights AI and other frontier technologies as new engines of growth. There will be a quest for deeper regional cooperation on AI, digital public services, standards interoperability, and for broader sharing of technologies. AI governance and applications in education and healthcare as well as youth and innovation programmes will be central aspects of the discussions.

AI and digitalization can either narrow or widen development gaps within APEC - it depends on how they are adopted and governed. Their impact is not predetermined; it is shaped by investment, education, infrastructure, and public policy.

APEC promotes innovation and inclusive development as a way to achieve sustainable economic growth across its member economies. AI and digitalization are powerful tools rather than guaranteed solutions. If APEC members invest in digital infrastructure, skills, innovation, and inclusive policies, these technologies can help reduce development gaps by improving productivity and expanding opportunities. If access to technology, education, and investment remains uneven, however, AI and digitalization could widen existing economic and social inequalities within the Asia-Pacific region.

APEC can serve as an effective platform for coordinating and enhancing sustainability and digital standards, even though its agreements are generally voluntary and non-binding. Because APEC brings together 21 Asia-Pacific economies with diverse levels of development, it provides a forum for cooperation, dialogue, and the sharing of best practices rather than imposing regulations.

Developing economies do not necessarily have to choose between economic growth and environmental sustainability. With adequate financing, international cooperation, strong institutions, and carefully sequenced reforms, they can achieve a green transition that promotes long-term growth, creates jobs, and improves resilience while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Success depends on careful policy design and a gradual, well-planned transition rather than abrupt changes.

A successful green transition is gradual and follows a logical sequence. If the transition is managed effectively, green investment can become a source of economic growth. Innovation and inclusive development are mutually reinforcing. Innovation creates new ideas, technologies, products, and business models that drive environmentally sustainable growth, while inclusive development ensures that the benefits of growth are shared across society rather than concentrated among a few people or regions.

There are several key aspects of the linkage between innovation and inclusive development. First, innovation drives inclusive development. New technologies and business innovations can improve access to education, healthcare, financial services, and employment. Second, inclusive development supports innovation. When more people have access to quality education, healthcare, finance, and technology, a larger and more diverse group can contribute new ideas and entrepreneurial ventures. This broadens the talent pool and increases creativity. Third, together they promote sustainable economic growth. Innovation boosts productivity and competitiveness, while inclusive policies help reduce poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. Fourth, they strengthen resilience. Economies that encourage innovation while ensuring broad participation are better able to adapt to technological change, economic shocks, and global challenges.

Innovation can increase productivity, create new industries, and improve living standards. However, without inclusive policies, the benefits may not reach everyone. By combining innovation with inclusive development, APEC seeks to create higher-quality jobs, reduce income and opportunity gaps, strengthen economic resilience and foster sustainable, long-term growth throughout the region. Some APEC economies like China, ROK, Japan, and Singapore have acquired leading roles in AI, EV and batteries, biotechnology, material science, and modern production methods.

APEC promotes digital technologies and entrepreneurship while also helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), women, youth, and underserved communities gain the skills and resources needed for the digital economy. Innovation can create opportunities for everyone, not just large companies or developed economies.

Innovation and inclusive development are central to APEC's vision of strong, balanced, secure, sustainable, and inclusive growth. Innovation provides the engine for economic growth, while inclusive development ensures that the benefits of that growth are shared fairly. Together, they build a more prosperous and resilient region and lead to higher living standards, reduced inequality, greater social participation, as well as long-term, sustainable development. APEC can help ensure AI and digitalization reduce, rather than increase, development gaps while promoting a trusted and interoperable digital economy. Cooperation with regard to renewable energy, energy efficiency and the circular economy will be critical as will be sharing of best practices on climate resilience and sustainable infrastructure.

APEC is well positioned to coordinate and enhance sustainability and digital standards by promoting dialogue, capacity building, and voluntary alignment among its members. While it cannot enforce common rules, it can help develop shared principles, encourage best practices, and foster regional cooperation, making it an important platform for advancing sustainable and inclusive growth in the Asia-Pacific region.

Yet, APEC also faces several limitations. Its decisions are non-binding, so implementation depends on individual member economies. Members have different levels of economic development, technological capacity, and policy priorities. There can be differing views on issues such as data governance, privacy, cybersecurity, and environmental regulation. Geopolitical tensions may make consensus more difficult on some topics.

Given China's emphasis on regional cooperation, cultural exchange and the creative economy, culture may well assume the role of a supporting summit theme. As important components of the digital and the creative economy, culture and AI intersect. Thus, APEC 2026 Shenzhen may well give rise to a dedicated platform for "Culture + AI". AI is already central to the APEC agenda, and culture could be a useful lens through which AI, education, tourism, creative industries, and people-to-people connectivity are discussed and promoted.

AI and culture together possess a transformative role in advancing sustainable development and in promoting the cultural and creative sectors. The latter includes expanding access to heritage and creative content as well as supporting multilingualism and digital innovation. Overall, AI can help tackle most environmental sustainability issues and strengthen inclusive and sustainable cultural ecosystems.

AI is not culturally neutral. It is reshaping culture at all levels and in all fields. When responsibly governed, AI can support cultural diversity, increase access to cultural content, preserve endangered traditions and foster intercultural dialogue.

Culture influences lifestyles, creative innovation, ethical technology use, and preservation of indigenous knowledge systems. Culturally grounded AI systems can integrate indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. Cultural heritage, local traditions, and artistic expressions ensure that AI solutions are socially accepted and locally relevant. Creative industries and expressions, such as music, film, literature, fashion and design can all benefit from AI. Language preservation through AI-powered translation tools can increase cross-cultural communication by breaking language barriers. Without cultural integration, AI risks reinforcing bias and inequality, undermining local identities, and widening the digital divide.

However, the use of AI still needs to overcome critical challenges, such as the digital divide between the Global North and the Global South, cultural and linguistic biases inherent in AI datasets, the risk of cultural homogenization, data privacy concerns and excessive energy and water consumption harmful to sustainability. As regards the application of AI, there is concern among some countries, particularly among the Global South, that they might be left out through want of infrastructure, such as power supply, computing power and training resources. China is now projecting itself to meet these needs.

While AI is a powerful tool - culture is the compass that guides its direction. The convergence of AI and culture presents a strategic opportunity to advance sustainable modernization through high-quality, green, and inclusive AI infrastructure in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

AI is already reshaping economies and societies and is approaching a critical juncture in its development, governance and application. In his keynote speech at the July 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, President Xi Jinping placed particular emphasis on international cooperation, AI governance and capacity building for the Global South.

China and the United States are among the world's leading powers in AI development, although their approaches to AI innovation, deployment and governance differ in important respects. China has increasingly emphasized open-weight and open-source AI development as a way of expanding access, lowering deployment costs and encouraging broader participation. At the same time, the U.S. AI ecosystem includes both open and proprietary models, with leading companies pursuing different approaches to model access and commercialization.

AI is a challenge to governance and calls for innovation. The flow of data, ethical issues such as abuse of the technology, weaponization of AI by some countries and fragmentation are real, pressing challenges that are beyond the reach of a single country with a one-size-fits-all solution. This is a collective challenge of consensus building. China is appealing to countries, industry and tech leaders, and scientists around the world to come up with a multilateral and collective AI governance model.

The global AI race is no longer just about chips or models. Increasingly, it is also about data. Data has become one of the most important inputs in the modern economy, especially as access to high-quality information increasingly shapes the global race to develop artificial intelligence.

But while US policymakers tend to view data primarily through a national security lens, China is pursuing a much broader strategy aimed at unlocking data's economic value.

This is why China has formally designated data as a “factor of production” – which is impacting significantly the country's technology and economic policies. The construction of a national ecosystem of Chinese-language data for AI has been identified as a new strategic frontier.

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, released in July 2026, is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that the company describes as the world's largest in its category. Its launch has intensified discussion about the competitiveness of Chinese AI models, particularly in terms of cost, openness and customization. Some Chinese models are increasingly competitive with leading U.S. systems in specific tasks, although it would be premature to conclude that open-weight Chinese models have broadly surpassed proprietary U.S. models across the AI market. Five Chinese Open Router models—Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax and Z.ai—now occupy the top spots by weekly token usage. They are "open-weight," allowing users to download, customize and run them on their own systems. Businesses can use cheaper systems for routine coding, summarization, data extraction and customer service, reserving premium models for their hardest problems.

These developments underscored the geopolitical stakes of the U.S.-China contest for leadership in what many see as the defining technological race of our time. President Trump has repeatedly framed maintaining America's lead in artificial intelligence as a strategic imperative for preserving the country's economic and national security. The emergence of AI as a foundational technology with far-reaching economic and security implications has contributed to U.S. efforts to restrict China's access to certain advanced semiconductors and related technologies used in cutting-edge AI development. This spurred China's efforts to build its own know-how and intensifying the rivalry between the world's two biggest economies. Chinese AI researchers routinely cite shortages of computing power — caused by US export controls — as the industry's biggest constraint, and companies have spent heavily to secure scarce chips.

But the scale of fund-raising by Chinese AI firms pales in comparison to their US rivals. In May 2026, Moonshot AI raised about US$2 billion in a funding round led by Meituan's venture arm, Long-Z Investments, with participation from China Mobile. The round valued the company at more than US$20 billion.

Let us have a quick look at the impact of the AI boom on ASEAN and its 11 countries, which all also belong to APEC. On 11 August 2026, Rahma Arifa analysed in the Hinrich Thought Leadership newsletter of the Hinrich Foundation the impact of the AI boom on ASEAN. Her reflections have an equal relevance for the APEC community.

From semiconductor manufacturing to data centers, cloud infrastructure and research hubs, Southeast Asia is key for both resources and innovation in the AI race. AI-driven investments are projected to induce by 2030 a 10-18% increase for the region's GDP. But the demand for power, land, water and industrial capacity means the AI boom is also a stress test on whether ASEAN can convert the gains of its individual member states into a collective regional win.

As AI infrastructure extends across national borders through power grids, subsea cables, and cloud services, ASEAN needs stronger coordination to capture greater value from the AI economy. However, a thriving AI boom in Southeast Asia is not an automatic credit for ASEAN – or for that matter APEC -, as the unfolding AI race is a race between member states. But some elements of the AI-related infrastructure increasingly extend across national borders. Yet ASEAN is nowhere near acting as a single economic bloc in ways that might amplify gains from individual races into collective leverage for the region. The same predicament applies to APEC.

ASEAN will conclude in November 2026 the first region-wide binding agreement for the digital economy including cross-border data flows, electronic payments, and AI. As the digital economy expands, it makes the case for ASEAN to step up coordination of physical resources and infrastructure across the region. Meeting network needs such as subsea cables and energy grids will likewise require unprecedented cooperation among ASEAN members. APEC may well be able to take a page from this approach.

These are, for now, my reflections about the forthcoming APEC November summit. Let us now await the discussions and results of the summit itself and how it will advance the growth, sustainable development, prosperity, and cohesion of the APEC region.