Trade between China and the Arab League has been growing with the past two decades since a deepened economic cooperation was ushered in after the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum was launched in 2004. Statistics from China’s General Administration of Customs show that the aggregate amount of trade between the two regions, as tallied by GAC, rose from 303.81 billion yuan in 2004 to 2.8 trillion yuan, about 393.75 billion U.S. dollars by 2023-that is a staggering increase of 820.9 percent.
Majority trade between China and the Arab League Countries is still increasing to new heights history. Data from China shows that due to the increase, in the first four months of the year, trade between China and Arab countries increased by 3.8 percent to register 946.17 billion yuan. This is in total 6.9 percent of the country’s foreign trade.
In terms of trade, the major trading partners of China with the Arab League are United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, accounting for 84.8 percent of total trade volumes. China has emerged as a crucial source of supply in the region with the main focus areas being automobiles and textiles. Chinese exports of these items were up by 66.3 percent and 3.2 percent from January to April 2024 compared to last year.
On the import side, China sourced a big percentage of its needs for energy from the Arab League. Energy products figured at 38 percent of the energy imports that China received within the first four months of 2024, amounting to 397.29 billion yuan.
In this budding trading relationship, private enterprises played an important role, for between January and April 2024, they accounted for 52.5% of the total China-Arab trade, up 5.7 percentage points from the same period last year.
At the 10th ministerial meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Beijing, China, several bilateral and multilateral cooperation agreements were signed with member states and the General Secretariat of the League to further strengthen their partnership in various sectors.
