Armenia and China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Lost Opportunities and Future Prospects 2.0

Yerevan needs to create concrete and real road map for developing its relations with Beijing. China is a young, eastern superpower of the World, which provides tremendous investments. It is already in the neighborhood of Armenia, but Armenian diplomacy still was not able to bring any Chinese serous investment to Armenia. Armenia is also a member of EAEU, which provides an opportunity to Yerevan to implement its policy towards Beijing in multilateral level as well, using the fact that Russia and China decided in 2015 to conjunct EAEU and China’s BRI and that the Agreement on Trade and Economic Cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Union and the People’s Republic of China was signed on May 17, 2018 in Astana. According to this document, the Parties agreed to develop cooperation in agriculture, energy, transport, industrial cooperation, information and communication infrastructure, technology and innovation, finance, and environment. Thus, Armenia needs to investigate the opportunities that this agreement provides to boost the Sino-Armenian relations bilaterally as well as multilaterally. Statistics provided by China’s General Administration of Customs shows that the volume of trade between the two economies totaled US $994 million in 2020, of which US $222 million was Armenia’s export to China and US $772 was its import from that country. Therefore, Armenia has a negative balance with its bilateral trade with China. The other worrying moment in this trade relations is also that, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, China’s imports from Armenia are mostly minerals, while China exports clothes, shoes, machinery, chemicals, equipment, construction materials and food to Armenia. To conclude, Yerevan needs to find ways and negotiate with China so that the latter increases purchases of different goods already produced in Armenia, not only minerals.