Southeast Asian leaders kicked off a multilateral summit on Thursday expected to address tensions in the South China Sea and tackle plans for a post-pandemic economic recovery in a region where US-China rivalry has been rising.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) has so far not been "drawn into the maelstroms" of those rivalries and challenges to the international multilateral system, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said in his opening remarks at the 37th Asean Summit in Hanoi.