Iran and China signed a 25-year “strategic cooperation pact” Saturday in the latest expansion of Beijing’s flagship trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative as the US rivals move closer together.
Negotiations for the deal, launched five years ago, sparked controversy in Iran last year and virtually no details of its contents have been released.
China is Iran’s leading trade partner and was one of the biggest buyers of Iranian oil before then US president Donald Trump reimposed sweeping unilateral sanctions in 2018 after abandoning a multilateral nuclear agreement with Tehran.
The China-Iran pact, which Tehran said included “political, strategic and economic” components, was signed by the two countries’ foreign ministers, Wang Yi and Mohammad Javad Zarif, an AFP correspondent reported.
“We believe this document can be very effective in deepening” Iran-China relations, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said, recalling that the…
Source: Vanguard Newspaper
