Friendly relations between China and Vietnam integral to Asian community with a shared future: China Daily editorial

The warm welcome President Xi Jinping received in Hanoi when he arrived for a two-day state visit to Vietnam starting on Tuesday shows the friendly "camaraderie plus brotherhood" that defines the relationship between the two countries.

The comprehensive strategic partnership between the two neighbors has great potential to tap, as indicated by the in-depth discussions between Xi and his hosts.

The Chinese leader's visit to Vietnam also provides an opportunity for an exchange of views on overarching and strategic issues that bear on the direction of the relationship between the two countries as well as international and regional issues of mutual concern.

As Xi said in his signed article published in a Vietnamese newspaper on Tuesday, it is China's sincere hope that the two peoples will always hold the traditional friendship close to their hearts so as to reinforce the consensus on building a China-Vietnam community with a shared future.

Xi urged the two sides to maintain strategic communication, make good use of the two countries' complementary strengths, step up friendly exchanges, and properly manage their differences. 

The building of a China-Vietnam community with a shared future will be a timely response to some external forces' divisive efforts to sow discord between the two neighbors. It can serve as a model for other Asian countries, and thus be a key element in the building of an Asian community with a shared future.

As Xi said in his article, that will lend more positive energy to regional countries' efforts to strengthen the good-neighborliness in Asia that has so effectively served the region's development.

People in Asia have, as Xi pointed out, increasingly come to realize that peace, development and progress are dependent on the principles of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness and the Asian values of peace, cooperation, inclusiveness and integration. They know that building a peaceful, tranquil, prosperous, beautiful, amicable and harmonious home in Asia can only be achieved by vigorously working together and making one country's development part of the common development of all countries in the region.

Asia's future should be in the hands of no one but Asians. The building of a China-Vietnam community with a shared future will, as Xi said, lend more positive energy to the region's concerted efforts to promote long-term development and consolidate the good-neighborliness that has been a defining feature of Asia's dynamic transformation in recent decades.