One of my jobs in what I came to think of as a corridor business did not look like one at the time. It was in the years before COVID-19, at China Business Network, a small but meaningful consultancy in Beijing, where my role was to help governments attract Chinese visitors, which gave me an actual front-row seat to what I think of as modern commerce.

This was the era when Chinese travellers took 155 million trips abroad in a single year, and spent US$255 billion doing it, reported McKinsey back then. It was amazing to witness, because the world was hungry for a share of it, and governments from Qatar, Bahrain, Luxembourg, the Ivory Coast, Sudan, American tourism boards and destinations, and many more came to our door, all with the same request: help us make the Chinese visitor comfortable in our country, comfortable enough to stay and spend, and show us how to, before our neighbours figure it out.

Our job was to move them to the front of that queue by means of marketing, promotion, media, and consulting advisory services. We secured them top billing at Beijing’s flagship tourism events, had their destinations promoted to the Chinese public, media appearances, and partnerships with local businesses. Needless to say, they routinely stole the show, and the partnerships we grew lasted many, many years.

In hindsight, those governments rehearsed a relationship with a rising economic power, learning its holidays, payment applications, its hospitality codes, and its way of building trust. A tour bus was a prototype to what would pave the way to something greater, a bond I saw take place with every market we served: people flows predict capital flows. Governments signed agreements constantly with China, but only some became actual corridors; now, to know which ones will shape the future, watch the arrivals hall at airports.

The sequence has a shape

Signatures on paper come first; for instance, ASEAN and China signed their framework trade agreement in 2002, ASEAN reported, with Beijing granting approved-destination status country by country, and Chinese delegations initiated agreements on nearly every state visit then. But we all know early paper is only permission, not proof of anything, and a lot of signed agreements never made it past the initial stage. What made the others succeed was how they moved, the number of their visitors, the small adaptations, Mandarin signage, familiar payment rails, staff trained to understand what Chinese guests actually wanted, and with that, familiarity was quietly building between parties.

Familiarity allowed deep architecture to consolidate, and from that, trade under the agreement grew more than fivefold. ASEAN overtook the EU as China’s largest trading partner in 2020, Nation Thailand reported, with two-way trade reaching a record US$984 billion in 2024, while the region has been the top FDI recipient among developing regions for four consecutive years, with manufacturing FDI climbing nearly 150 per cent to US$44 billion, which led to CAFTA 3.0 arriving only in late 2025, a quarter century after the framework.

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So when we say it’s signatures first, people, second, and they’re the real test. Then comes capital, and only then deep architecture that allows existing flows to run. Nothing de-risks a market like millions of ordinary encounters involving tourists, students, and pilgrims are a distribution of due-diligence networks that predict which signed agreement truly comes alive, while others vanish in the halls they were signed in.

Now, watch the same tape run one more time

Apply the rule today, and something jumps out: Asia is emerging as a top choice for Gulf travellers, with destinations from Singapore, Bangkok to Phuket, Penang, and Bali adapting through halal-friendly services and expanding air links with the Gulf. In the Global Muslim Travel Index 2025, Singapore leads every non-OIC destination while Malaysia holds the top position among OIC countries: Southeast Asia is where the Gulf goes on holiday, and notice the symmetry here: some of the same Gulf states that once courted Chinese travellers have become the source market everyone else now adapts for.

This said, unlike the China corridor, this one has a cultural floor, with Indonesia holding the world’s largest Muslim population, halal is natively ingrained, not an accommodation, and a Gulf family lands in Southeast Asia already halfway to comfortable, so a corridor there that serves this public should run the sequence faster.

Now, look one step behind the travellers

Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds manage more than US$5.6 trillion in assets, a figure projected to reach US$8.8 trillion by 2030, wrote Foreign Policy, increasingly run from offices in Asia rather than London now. This is one of the reasons why the Gulf is converting a finite oil endowment into permanent stakes in the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets while hedging deliberately against the unpredictability of Washington’s tariffs, thrown here, there and everywhere.

Asia House expects GCC trade with emerging Asia to climb from US$450 billion in 2023 to US$680 billion by 2030, and the whole deployment has already begun with Abu Dhabi’s ADIA partnering with the Indonesia Investment Authority on toll roads, joining the consortium that acquired Malaysian Airports. While in May 2025, Kuala Lumpur hosted the first-ever ASEAN-GCC-China trilateral summit, here are three blocs representing a combined GDP of US$24.87 trillion and some 2.15 billion people.

Also Read: As global trade fragments, Southeast Asia must build leverage, not just attract investment

I must add, if the China sequence I spoke about took two decades, endless tour buses, and trade partners to take shape, the Gulf-Southeast Asia way is being paved; it is still in its early days, and that’s exactly when positioning is still cheap and highly rewarding, while other regions are still figuring things out.

Northeast Asia is already running the experiment

Adaptation is a choice, not an accident of geography, and Korea and Japan are running the experiment on behalf of Southeast Asia. It needs to learn from the following two neighbours, and how their diverging results preview what happens when a lead is tended, and another is left alone.

South Korea’s tourism authorities have run a systematic Muslim-friendly program for over a decade, with four-tier restaurant classification, prayer kits for hotels, guide training, and incentives for prayer rooms, and what makes the program remarkable is the anti-Muslim sentiment wind that has been sweeping the country.

South Koreans had years-long conflict over a mosque in Daegu, reported the Korea Herald, where opponents to the project placed pig heads outside the construction site, and a 2018 petition against Yemeni asylum seekers that drew some 700,000 signatures. South Korea’s tourism professionals looked at where travellers are going, and built the pavement anyway.

Japan is the sharper, and quite unconventional, lesson. It made a move very early, and reached an all-time high of 3rd place among non-OIC destinations in the 2019 index, but the country’s efforts remained fragmented. Japan’s tourism authority acknowledges that there is no central agency that handles halal accreditation, and by 2023, the country slipped to the 6th position while Singapore held the non-OIC top spot in 2025. In short, Japan’s early adaptation decayed as soon as it stopped moving forward.

Why people always come first

I learned the trust half in person. I am from northern France, bordering Germany, where business means punctuality, agendas, and follow-through, and I’ve witnessed that in some parts of the world, trust translated into dinners, over months, through relationships preceding any transaction. I began closing deals only when I stopped selling and started understanding and adapting.

That gap now sits in the middle of the Gulf-Southeast Asia corridor mentioned, not only through language alone, but the deeper kind that displays how trust is established before anyone shows a number, and what silence means in Riyadh versus Jakarta. Every Gulf family in Langkawi, every Emirati student in Kuala Lumpur, every new direct flight quietly closes that gap, and the visitors are the corridor’s earliest infrastructure that shapes the future of the bond.

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The caveat and how founders can use the rule

All in all, the GCC remains only ASEAN’s seventh-largest trading partner, and the bloc-level ASEAN-GCC free trade agreement is still a feasibility study, not a signature. The good news is Malaysia went the farthest into the relationship by launching its own FTA negotiations with the GCC, and this is where founders can leverage existing opportunities.

Treat travel data as market intelligence: arrival numbers, flight routes, and Muslim-friendly rankings are public leading indicators almost nobody in technology reads. Build cultural awareness and readiness before the wave, as the businesses that adapted early to Chinese visitors did, because the same window is open now for Gulf customers across hospitality, retail, health, education, and digital services, and sell to the Gulf rather than merely raising from it.

Where Southeast Asia fits

Back at China Business Network, the governments that won Chinese visitors were never the ones with the biggest budgets; they were the ones willing to learn how the other side built trust. They were the ones who kept coming back to Beijing, learned what comfort meant to a Chinese guest, from the food on the table to the pace of a negotiation, and built it before their rivals did.

Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim has long maintained that neutrality is the source of ASEAN’s centrality, and the arrival halls suggest the market agrees. In a world where great powers force everyone to choose, the scarcest asset is a place that forces no one, and that is what keeps Southeast Asia’s terminals full. The pattern has run through the region twice, first with China, now the Gulf region, which is currently after Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Great treaties follow the flows, and corridors get built in a way that no summit can legislate, with halal kitchens a Bangkok hotel adds, the Arabic-speaking staff at a Kuala Lumpur clinic, the direct flight that turns a Gulf family’s holiday into a habit. Millions of small welcomes like these are the region’s real endowment, so when the ASEAN-GCC agreement moves from speeches to signatures, the advantage will belong to those who spent years studying their markets, language, and habits.

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