China and India’s imports from Iran have grown steadily since the 1990s, only to drop steeply in 2018, largely due to US sanctions on Iran’s trading partners in 2019. China’s imports from Iran decreased sharply when the Trump Administration placed sanctions on Iran and threatened to punish Iran’s trading partners like China and India. Imports from Iran have been made expensive by the financial sanctions on Iranian banks which cut them off from the SWIFT system.
Prepared by
Rahul Karan Reddy
Rahul Karan Reddy is Senior Research Associate at Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA). He works on domestic Chinese politics and trade, producing data-driven research in the form of reports, dashboards and digital media. He is the author of ‘Islands on the Rocks’, a monograph on the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute between China and Japan. He is the creator of the India-China Trade dashboard, the Chinese Provincial Development Indicators dashboard and co-lead for the project ‘Episodes of India-China Exchanges: Modern Bridges and Resonant Connections’. He is co-convenor of ORCA’s annual conference, the Global Conference on New Sinology (GCNS) and co-editor of ORCA’s daily newsletter, Conversations in Chinese Media (CiCM). He was previously a Research Analyst at the Chennai Center for China Studies (C3S), working on China’s foreign policy and domestic politics. His work has been published in The Diplomat, 9 Dash Line, East Asia Forum, ISDP & Tokyo Review, among others. He is also the Director of ORCA Consultancy.