The ceremony itself was simple. Mr. Li Mingxing, WTCA Global Governor and Chairman of the Asia-Pacific World Trade Business Alliance, together with Mr. Wang Xun, WTCA Vice President, handed the appointment letters to Mr. Blake Zhang, Chairman of the Board and Chairman; Ms. Zhu Xiaolan (Xiaolan Zhu), Chief Representative and CEO; and to me. When my turn came, what went through my mind was not a sense of "finally made it," but the three business lines that now had to be delivered — the One Club business club, the GlobalX go-global accelerator, and the WTC investment fund — and how to turn them from paper architecture into things that actually happen.
In his address, Chairman Li Mingxing noted that Asia-Pacific remains one of the few regions in today's globalization that is still stable, open, and innovative, and he hoped WTC Singapore could convert that "stability" into real regional development momentum. Vice President Wang Xun's advice was more concrete — he hoped WTC Singapore would function as an international capital hub, helping the WTCA's global network itself upgrade its investment and financing capacity, so that it could truly become a World Trade Center "with differentiated competitiveness," rather than just another nameplate institution.
"Many institutions write very grand visions at their founding. The hard part is not writing the sentence 'connect international capital, innovation, and global markets' — it is, three years later, looking back and seeing whether that sentence has become something concrete that actually happened, something you can point to and name."
— Bruce Dong, Secretary-General & COO, WTC SingaporeThere was one more thing at the ceremony I personally valued more: WTC Singapore signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Financial & Cultural Trade Promotion Committee under the China International Trade Institute, a high-end think tank affiliated with the Ministry of Commerce. To me this was not a pretty memorandum to put on a shelf — for the "Top-Level Insight Circle" to truly stand on its own, it cannot rely on us debating behind closed doors; it depends on sustained interaction with institutions that actually do policy research and hold first-hand information. Signing this agreement gave the circle its first genuinely weighty dialogue partner.
WTCA Executive Director Crystal Edn sent congratulations via video, looking forward to WTC Singapore developing in synergy with the WTCA global network. It sounds like a courtesy line, but to me it was a reminder — we are not doing something in isolation; we are plugging into an existing network spanning nearly a hundred countries and over 300 cities. That is both a resource and a pressure.
