China’s premier annual defence and security gathering opened in Beijing this week, drawing official delegations from nearly 100 countries, regions, and international organizations to the Beijing International Convention Center. The 13th Beijing Xiangshan Forum, running from September 15 to 17, carries added weight this year as it marks the two-decade anniversary of a platform that has grown from a modest academic exchange into one of Asia’s most closely watched security dialogues.

Scale and Participation

Organizers confirmed that this year’s forum has attracted more than 60 ministerial-level representatives and military chiefs, alongside scholars, former officials, and defence analysts. Notably, Western participation remained substantial, with delegates from New Zealand, Australia, and Canada among those attending — a point Chinese officials have highlighted as evidence of what they describe as the forum’s spirit of openness and inclusiveness.

The three-day programme is structured around four plenary sessions and eight parallel thematic discussions, held under the theme “Build Consensus on Stability, Advance Security Governance Together.” In a move aimed at maximizing resource sharing and aligning outcomes, the forum ran alongside the fourth China-Africa Peace and Security Forum, linking two of Beijing’s key security diplomacy tracks in a single window.

The Agenda: From Regional Flashpoints to AI Safety

Discussions this year have ranged widely, from persistent regional tensions across the Indo-Pacific to newer challenges around the governance of artificial intelligence in military and security contexts — a topic that has climbed rapidly up the agenda at defence forums worldwide.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, a regular participant in regional dialogue initiatives, described the forum as a valuable platform for frank exchanges at a moment of rising tensions. Several experts in attendance pressed for stronger international cooperation on AI governance, arguing that the pace of technological development is outstripping the frameworks meant to regulate its military application, and called for expanded dialogue as a confidence-building measure.

Among the more pointed interventions came from British scholar Jean Christophe Baron von Pfetten, who held up China’s Global Governance Initiative Concept Paper — released in 2025 — and told attendees: “This is the key of the future in this world. This is promoted by China, not for China, but for the world.” In an earlier interview, he argued that “governance is the most critical factor,” adding that without multilateralism, security problems proliferate and the United Nations operates under constraints. He went further still, describing China as “currently the ‘engine’ of world peace.”

It’s worth noting that such characterizations reflect the views of individual participants at a forum hosted and shaped by Beijing, and they sit within a broader international debate in which many governments assess China’s regional security role quite differently.

Backgrounder: Two Decades of the Xiangshan Forum

Launched in 2006, the Beijing Xiangshan Forum began as a relatively low-key track-two dialogue convened by Chinese think tanks. Over the years it has been progressively elevated, expanding to include serving defence ministers and military chiefs, and is now widely regarded as China’s answer to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore — the long-established security summit that has traditionally been shaped by Western and allied perspectives.

The forum’s growth mirrors the broader arc of Chinese defence diplomacy: a shift from participation in security conversations designed elsewhere toward hosting and framing those conversations directly. For Beijing, the platform serves several purposes at once — projecting an image of openness, offering a venue to articulate its own security concepts, and providing a setting for bilateral military-to-military contacts on the sidelines, including with the United States, whose relationship with China remains the single most consequential variable in Asian security.

A Wider Institutional Push

The forum does not exist in isolation. Beijing has been steadily reinforcing a network of regional institutions through which it channels security and economic cooperation. In August, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Secretary-General Nurlan Yermekbayev attended an event at the ASEAN-China Centre in Beijing marking anniversary milestones in China-ASEAN cooperation and the transition to new Secretary-General Zhang Lizhong, succeeding Shi Zhongjun. Yermekbayev used the occasion to acknowledge the Centre’s role in fostering interaction between ASEAN, the SCO Secretariat, and other regional partners — a reminder of how China’s various multilateral tracks increasingly interlock.

Way Forward: Governance, Competition, and the Question of Trust

The central proposition advanced at this year’s forum — that stability requires collective security governance rather than bloc-based arrangements — lands at a moment of genuine international uncertainty. Whether that proposition gains traction will depend less on the quality of the argument than on the durability of trust between major powers.

For China, the strategic logic is clear enough. Positioning itself as a convener of inclusive security dialogue offers a counterweight to alliance structures it views as containment-oriented, while the Global Governance Initiative provides a conceptual framework for its broader diplomatic ambitions. The presence of Western delegations suggests that even amid strategic competition, few governments are willing to forgo the channels of communication such forums provide.

The harder test lies ahead. Dialogue platforms are valuable precisely because they keep lines open during periods of friction — but they are not substitutes for the concrete mechanisms, crisis hotlines, and verifiable agreements that prevent miscalculation from escalating. As AI governance, maritime disputes, and US-China military competition all intensify simultaneously, the Xiangshan Forum’s second decade will likely be judged not by how many delegations it attracts, but by whether the consensus it seeks to build translates into arrangements that hold when tested.

A Diplomatic Milestone Wrapped in Mango Season

Pakistan and China established diplomatic relations in 1951, and 2026 marks 75 years of what both governments routinely describe as an “All-Weather Strategic Cooperative Partnership.” Throughout the year, Pakistani missions across China — from Beijing to Guangzhou — have organised a series of cultural and trade events to commemorate the milestone, with mangoes emerging as an especially popular centerpiece. Earlier this month, the Pakistan Embassy in Beijing hosted a similar festival at Pakistan House, drawing hundreds of guests. The Guangzhou edition extended that celebration to southern China’s commercial hub, a region with deep and growing import ties to Pakistani agricultural produce.

The Guangzhou event drew a wide cross-section of the city’s diplomatic and business community, including Consuls General, representatives of the Consular corps, officials from Foreign Affairs Offices, chamber of commerce leaders, entrepreneurs, scholars, students, and members of the local Pakistani community. The gathering reflected how food and trade diplomacy have become an effective bridge for building people-to-people ties alongside formal government engagement.

Mangoes as Ambassadors

Guests at the festival sampled a curated spread of Pakistan’s most celebrated mango varieties — Sindhri, Chaunsa, and Anwar Ratol — prized internationally for their fragrance, sweetness, and rich pulp. Beyond fresh fruit, the festival offered a range of mango-based creations, including mango milkshakes, mango yogurt shakes, mango custard, and mango ice cream, giving attendees a full sensory introduction to Pakistan’s mango culture.

Pakistan is among the world’s top mango producers, with orchards concentrated in Sindh and Punjab that have supplied the fruit to South Asian, Gulf, and increasingly Chinese markets for years. Chinese demand for Pakistani mangoes has grown steadily as trade facilitation and cold-chain logistics have improved, making events like this festival as much about commerce as culture. Local co-hosts, the Guangdong Chamber of Commerce of Importers & Exporters and the Guangzhou Jiangnan Market Imported Fruit Chamber of Commerce, represent exactly the kind of trade networks that move Pakistani produce into Chinese supermarkets and fruit markets, underscoring the festival’s dual purpose of celebration and commercial promotion.

Music, Performance, and a Shared Stage

Beyond the fruit tables, the festival featured cultural performances blending Pakistani and Chinese traditional music, offering guests a live demonstration of how the two nations’ artistic traditions can share a single stage. Such performances have become a recurring feature of Pakistan-China cultural diplomacy, reinforcing the idea that the relationship extends well beyond government offices and trade ledgers into classrooms, concert halls, and community gatherings.

Pakistan’s Deeper Roots on the Silk Road

The festival’s name is no accident. Pakistan’s geography places it at a historic crossroads of the ancient Silk Road, the network of trade routes that once linked China to Central Asia, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Mediterranean world. Regions of present-day Pakistan — including Gilgit-Baltistan, the Karakoram corridor, and the Indus Valley — served as vital passageways for caravans moving silk, spices, textiles, and ideas between Chinese dynasties and civilizations to the west. The legendary Karakoram Highway, built in the twentieth century along ancient trade paths through the Himalayas, is often called the “modern Silk Road” for the way it retraces those same historic connections between the two countries.

That centuries-old exchange of goods and culture laid the groundwork for the deep trust that characterizes Pakistan-China relations today. From the Silk Road’s caravans to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a flagship project connecting Gwadar Port to western China, the throughline is continuity: two civilizations repeatedly finding new routes, literal and symbolic, to reach each other. Framing a mango festival under the “Silk Road” banner deliberately draws on this history, positioning modern trade in fruit as a continuation of an exchange that predates the modern nation-state itself.

A Sweet Symbol of a Strategic Partnership

In remarks shared around the event, Pakistani officials described the relationship using an apt metaphor: like the mango, the All-Weather Strategic Cooperative Partnership between Pakistan and China is rooted in trust, nourished by cooperation, and ripened by the warmth of the people on both sides. It is a fitting image for a relationship that Pakistani officials frequently describe as “higher than the mountains and deeper than the oceans,” now recast in the more approachable language of shared meals and shared harvests.

Cultural Connectivity Through Cuisine

What events like the Silk Road Mango Festival ultimately reveal is that diplomacy often travels most effectively through a dinner table rather than a conference room. Food has a unique capacity to dissolve language barriers and formality, inviting people to experience another culture directly rather than simply hearing about it. When Chinese guests in Guangzhou tasted Sindhri and Chaunsa mangoes alongside Pakistani milkshakes and custards, they were not just sampling fruit — they were participating in a centuries-old tradition of culinary exchange that has connected China with South Asia since the earliest Silk Road caravans carried dried fruits, spices, and recipes alongside silk and porcelain.

This is why cuisine so often anchors cultural diplomacy: a shared meal creates common ground faster than a shared communique. Pakistani biryani nights in Chinese cities, Chinese culinary festivals in Pakistani universities, and now mango festivals like this one in Guangzhou all serve the same purpose — turning abstract diplomatic language about “friendship” and “partnership” into something tangible that people can taste, discuss, and remember. As Pakistan and China look toward the next 75 years of relations, it is this kind of cultural connectivity — built one mango, one dish, and one shared table at a time — that may prove just as enduring as any formal treaty.