A China-Central Asia freight train bound for Tashkent via Horgos departs from a station in Tianjin Port in North China's Tianjin, May 20, 2025. Photo: Xinhua
China's total trade with the five Central Asian countries grew by 10.4% year-on-year in the first five months this year to reach 286.42 billion yuan ($39.93 billion), setting a new record compared with corresponding periods in the previous years, according to data released by China's General Administration of Customs (GAC) on Sunday.
As a place where the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first proposed and a demonstration area of high-quality BRI cooperation, Central Asia has seen continuous deepening of economic partnership with China, and the scale of bilateral trade has steadily expanded, the data showed.
According to statistics from GAC, China's imports and exports with the five Central Asian countries has expanded from 312.04 billion yuan in 2013 to reach 674.15 billion yuan in 2024, marking a 116-percent increase. The average annual growth rate reached 7.3 percent, which was 2.3 percentage points higher than the average annual growth rate of China's overall foreign trade for the same period.
China is actively tapping into the potential for deeper agricultural cooperation with Central Asia, and an increasing number of green and quality agricultural products from the region are entering the Chinese market.
In the first five months of this year, China imported agricultural products worth 4.36 billion yuan from the five Central Asian countries, representing a 26.9 percent year-on-year growth. Among these, imports of flaxseed from Kazakhstan surged by 202.1 percent, raisins from Uzbekistan grew by 153.7 percent, and honey from Kyrgyzstan saw a remarkable surge of 10.9-fold.
Meanwhile, thanks to the development of a high-level infrastructure connectivity network, the surrounding land transport routes have been continuously optimized. The proportion of road transport in China's total imports and exports with the five Central Asian countries rose from 19.9 percent in 2020 to some 51.8 percent in 2024.
In the first five months of this year, China's road transport-related imports and exports to the five Central Asian countries reached 143.65 billion yuan, up 10.9 percent year-on-year, with the proportion continuing to surpassing 50 percent.
