Recently, the 26th ASEAN Summit was held in Malaysia. Although the conference had many highlights, there were not many actual results.

The South China Sea issue has attracted much attention, but progress has been slow. At the same time, issues such as the status of the East Asia Summit have also shown different development trends. These phenomena have triggered in-depth research on the deeper meaning behind the summit.

The decision-making process of the ASEAN Summit is relatively unique.

The adoption of the resolution requires complete consensus among the ten member states and must follow the guidelines of the rotating presidency.

This means that different issues will have different development effects due to the different preferences of the host country.

Hot-button issues usually depend on whether member states are willing to put them on the table for discussion.

It is precisely because of the existence of such a mechanism that the issues at the ASEAN Summit can show different progress in their resolution.

In a context where member states have different interests and are intertwined with many complex factors, this mechanism plays a decisive role in the progress of various issues.

Member states may have major differences on certain issues. Once the rotating chair country cannot coordinate, it will be very difficult to advance the issue.

Observing previous summits, most of the statements issued by the host countries were adopted, but Cambodia’s statement in 2012 was different.

This situation indirectly exposed the difficulties that ASEAN's decision-making system encountered under special circumstances.

The South China Sea issue has always been a focus that some ASEAN countries are keen to promote.

On the occasion of the 26th ASEAN Summit, my country's island construction activities in the South China Sea are regarded by some countries as a potential threat to regional peace, security and stability.

Although this topic has attracted much attention, as is common in previous summits, this summit also did not announce any substantive results or corresponding measures.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib urged that the matter be dealt with as soon as possible. At the same time, he proposed that ASEAN would launch a constructive dialogue with China.

However, there were no further follow-up actions after such a statement.

The main reason is that within ASEAN, there is very little consensus on the South China Sea issue, and each member country has its own interests to consider.

In this process we can see the complexity and sensitivity of geopolitical issues.

Countries have different views on issues such as the development of marine resources and the safety and security of shipping routes out of considerations of their own national interests. This has made it difficult to reach an effective consensus on the South China Sea issue within ASEAN.

2018 is the tenth year of the East Asia Summit.

Some member states have proposed enhancing the status and functions of the East Asia Summit.

Malaysia has high expectations this time as it is setting the agenda for the 10th East Asia Summit.

In the past decade, the international political and economic landscape of East Asia has experienced a series of changes. Under this new situation, the East Asia Summit is encountering new development opportunities and challenges.

The East Asia Summit is a key bridge between East Asian countries. If its status and role can be enhanced, it will significantly promote exchanges and cooperation in the region's economy, culture, politics and other fields.

This move is of great significance for strengthening ties within the region and promoting common development.

It can create a more open, diverse and inclusive inter-regional cooperation structure, make exchanges and cooperation among East Asian countries smoother, share the fruits of development, and work together to deal with various challenges.

Currently, the ten ASEAN countries are scattered across four time zones.

Countries are currently negotiating on time zone unification, with the goal of adjusting the time zone to the East Eight Zones, that is, synchronizing with our country's time. This move will allow countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei to be consistent with their current time zones.

This topic is of great significance for promoting synergy within the ASEAN region.

In the field of business communication, if time zones can be consistent, the time coordination of conference organization and trade activities of multinational companies will be smoother.

From the perspective of transportation and logistics, adopting a unified time zone is of great benefit to planning logistics transportation schedules, which in turn helps improve the overall efficiency of logistics operations.

However, the summit did not reach consensus on this issue and the discussion will be postponed to the next summit. This shows that although the topic is simple on the surface, it actually involves multiple complex factors such as differences in work schedules among countries and industrial cooperation.

During this summit, we devoted ourselves to disaster prevention and reduction and response to climate change, and achieved remarkable results.

Based on the statement on climate change in last year's Naypyidaw Declaration, this summit focused on the need for ASEAN countries and their people to improve their adaptive capabilities in disaster prevention, reduction and response to climate change, and to build appropriate response mechanisms.

As global climate change intensifies, the risk of meteorological disasters encountered by ASEAN countries continues to rise. Disasters such as floods, typhoons and droughts occur frequently, seriously affecting the infrastructure, agriculture and people's lives in these countries.

It is very urgent to build a mechanism to strengthen cooperation, which will help countries achieve effective collaboration in disaster early warning, emergency rescue, and disaster prevention infrastructure.

In addition to the unified time zone issue mentioned above, there are other important and fruitless issues.

The Malaysian Foreign Minister made a suggestion that may seem trivial, but actually has a significant impact on the efficiency of the summit—to reduce the summit agenda from twice a year to once. Unfortunately, this proposal was not properly addressed at this summit and is still pending.

This shows that the ASEAN Summit still encounters many difficulties in dealing with internal structural adjustment and model optimization issues.

Dear readers, in the face of many difficult problems at the ASEAN Summit, how can we improve the decision-making process and increase the speed of handling issues?