China, Central Asia see robust trade; upcoming summit set to inject further momentum into cooperation: expert

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 percent year-on-year in the first five months of this year to 286.42 billion yuan ($39.93 billion), a record high for the period, 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 a continuous deepening of its economic partnership with China, and the scale of bilateral trade has steadily expanded, the GAC said in a post on its WeChat account.

According to statistics from the GAC, China's trade with the five Central Asian countries expanded from 312.04 billion yuan in 2013 to 674.15 billion yuan in 2024, up 116 percent. 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 trade during the same period.

"Thanks to the joint construction of the BRI and China-Europe freight train service between China and the five Central Asian countries, trade between China and these countries posted rapid growth in recent years," Chen Fengying, a research fellow at the Beijing-based China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times on Sunday.

China has a vast consumer market and boasts a complete supply chain, which can align with the diverse development needs of the Central Asian economy, Chen said, noting that the complementary elements between China and the five Central Asian countries mean that they have vast room for cooperation.

China is actively tapping into the potential for 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, up 26.9 percent year-on-year. 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 increase of 10.9-fold, according to data from the GAC.

Meanwhile, thanks to the development of a high-level connectivity network, the surrounding land transport routes have been continuously optimized. The proportion of road transport in China's total trade with the five Central Asian countries rose from 19.9 percent in 2020 to 51.8 percent in 2024. In the first five months of this year, China's road transport-related trade with the five Central Asian countries reached 143.65 billion yuan, up 10.9 percent year-on-year, with the proportion remaining above 50 percent.

The data came as the second China-Central Asia Summit is scheduled to take place in Astana, Kazakhstan from June 16 to 18, according to Xinhua.

The upcoming China-Central Asia Summit is expected to inject further momentum into cooperation between China and Central Asia, and produce a positive effect on regional cooperation, Zhang Hong, a research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Cooperation between China and Central Asia continued to progress in recent years, and this summit will further consolidate the "1+5" dialogue mechanism and build a long-term communication platform, he said.

In recent years, there have been multiple highlights in the cooperation between China and Central Asia. For instance, the construction of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway project has officially kicked off. Thanks to the joint construction of a green BRI, more Chinese new-energy vehicle brands have entered Central Asia, injecting new momentum into the green development of these countries, according to Xinhua.

Amid a complex and volatile international environment, there is a need for China and the five Central Asian countries to enhance their cooperation in various areas including regional cooperation, economic and trade exchanges, and people-to-people exchanges, Zhang said.