December 31, 2021
Iran signed a “strategic agreement” with China in March that was billed as the beginning of a new and much closer alliance between the two countries, but the main development since then is that trade has plummeted.
In fact, Iran is no longer among China’s five main trade partners in the Middle East, according to Majid-Reza Hariri, the head of the Iran-China Joint Chamber of Commerce.
Speaking to the Iranian Labor News Agency (INA), Hariri said that until seven or eight years ago Iran was China’s primary trade partner in the Middle East and North Africa. But no more.
He said when the country is under sanctions, it has a few options even in talks with the Chinese, since major Chinese companies want to sell in the United States and Iran does not figure in their plans.
Hariri said China is currently the second largest economy in the world and its trade with others is many times more than with Iran; for this reason, sanctions definitely impede China’s trade with Iran.
Hariri is just the latest of many people commenting that sanctions hurt Iran and seeming to urge the government to stop dragging its feet and work harder to reach an agreement with the United States that will end sanctions.
Hariri said that since Iran’s oil sales to China have slowed due to sanctions, China now buys oil from other countries in the Persian Gulf and therefore its trade with those countries is rising and for this reason the Persian Gulf states have become China’s top trade partners in the region and Iran is not among the top five China’s trade partners in the region.
There have been only minimal indicators of a China-Iran relationship since the strategic agreement was signed in March. The latest was the issuance of parallel sets of postage stamps December 11 to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of relations between the two countries.