"Together with Fangchenggang and Beihai ... handled 10 million TEUs in 2025, with ILSTC shipments exceeding 1.4 million TEUs." That single statistic captures why Singapore’s senior officials were in Nanning on May 18: they were inspecting not just ports and canals, but the backbone of a strategic logistics corridor that links western China to Southeast Asia and beyond.
Lee Hsien Loong’s visit to Nanning: a deliberate walk through the corridor
Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong arrived in Nanning on May 18 with officials from finance, foreign affairs, digital development, and manpower. Media reports framed the visit as an effort to “deepen Singapore’s ties with China at the regional level.” During the trip Lee met Guangxi Communist Party chief Chen Gang and toured sites that lie along the New International Land‑Sea Trade Corridor (ILSTC), the multimodal freight route running from Chongqing through Guangxi to Qinzhou Port and onward by ship to Singapore and ASEAN markets.
The ILSTC’s anatomy: Chongqing, Qinzhou, Beibu Gulf and the Pinglu Canal
The ILSTC begins in Chongqing and runs southwest to Qinzhou on the Beibu Gulf, then by container ship to Singapore. Thirteen provincial-level regions in western China — including Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, and Xinjiang — participate alongside Singapore, which serves as the corridor’s transshipment hub. The corridor’s institutional anchor is the China‑Singapore (Chongqing) Connectivity Initiative (CCI), under which Singapore and Chongqing serve as dual hubs.
At the coast, Qinzhou, together with Fangchenggang and Beihai, handled 10 million TEUs in 2025, with ILSTC shipments exceeding 1.4 million TEUs and corridor throughput growing 50 percent year‑on‑year since a 2017 pilot. Lee also inspected the Pinglu Canal — a 134‑kilometer, roughly $10 billion waterway running from the Xijin Reservoir to the Beibu Gulf near Qinzhou. Construction is three months ahead of schedule, with trial voyages expected from July and a commercial opening planned at the China‑ASEAN Expo in September. The canal will bypass the Pearl River Delta, cut 560 kilometers off the Nanning‑to‑sea route, reduce the distance between Nanning and Singapore by up to 740 kilometers, and is projected to save about $730 million in annual logistics costs once at full capacity.
Maritime strategy and the Beibu Gulf’s protection
The ILSTC’s southern marine leg terminates in a gulf that is not an open, unprotected sea. To the east lies Hainan Island and the Yulin Naval Base at Sanya, identified in the record as China’s primary submarine base in the South China Sea. The source describes this geography as allowing Beijing to cast “a credible deterrent umbrella” over the Beibu Gulf — meaning attempts to interdict cargo there would face a different risk calculus than in the open South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. Beijing also seeks to keep Vietnam aligned: unlike disputes elsewhere in the South China Sea, the Gulf of Tonkin’s maritime boundary with Vietnam was settled in December 2000 and has been in force since 2004, and the Chinese and Vietnamese navies completed their 40th joint patrol in those waters in March 2026.
Singapore’s embedded role: commerce, data governance, and security ties
Singapore is not merely a terminal. Under the CCI administrative bureau the ILSTC is formally described as “a strategic corridor jointly built by China and Singapore.” Commercially, Pacific International Lines runs twice‑weekly services between Singapore and Qinzhou, forming the sea leg of the corridor. Digitally, a Digital ILSTC MOU signed in December 2025 between Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Chongqing Municipal Government covers AI, blockchain, data analytics and digital trade policy, giving Singapore governance architecture over the corridor’s data and logistics intelligence layer. Strategically, Singapore’s Changi Naval Base hosts visiting U.S. aircraft carriers and submarines; since the 2015 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, the U.S. flies P‑8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft from Singapore, contributing to anti‑submarine surveillance across the South China Sea. Those commercial, digital and security connections place Singapore inside “every layer of the ILSTC,” as the source puts it.
How Beijing, Singapore, and Washington view the corridor
- Beijing: The ILSTC provides a southern maritime alternative if trade through the Taiwan Strait or the East and South China seas is disrupted. The source notes China’s dependence on the strait — roughly $1.4 trillion of Chinese imports and exports transited it in 2022 — and frames the corridor as a way to protect inland production hubs like Chongqing.
- Singapore: The city‑state’s role as transshipment hub, digital governance partner under the Digital ILSTC MOU, and security interlocutor makes it indispensable to the corridor’s operations; the visit by Lee Hsien Loong is characterized as a maintenance move to preserve that indispensability.
- Washington: The source describes U.S. naval and air activity from Singapore and notes that both China and America benefit from an UNCLOS‑compliant Strait of Malacca; the legal regime helps keep the Malacca terminal leg open to maritime traffic.
There is a near‑term calendar of milestones that will test and affirm the corridor’s practical resilience: trial voyages on the Pinglu Canal are expected from July, with a commercial opening at the China‑ASEAN Expo in September. In the framing offered by this record, Lee’s Nanning trip was not a ceremonial visit but a walk through arteries Singapore helped design — arteries Beijing cannot afford to see disrupted, and that bind Singapore’s commercial, digital and security posture ever closer to China’s wartime logistics planning.
Source: The Diplomat — The Strategic Corridor Turning Singapore Into China’s Indispensable Partner
