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Bilateral trade between Russia and China has increased by 2.1% year-on-year to US$222.774 billion in the first eleven months of 2024, according to data released on Tuesday (December 10) by China’s customs. That implies a 2024 total of US$243 billion will be reached for the year, a record high and slightly more than last years figure.
Trade growth has slowed this year due to Western financial sanctions impacting the ability to make financial settlements. Last year, bilateral trade had increased by 26.3% to a record US$240.11 billion. Sanctions have slowed the growth rate, but not the volumes.
According to the Chinese data, exports from Russia to China increased by 0.4% to US$118.578 billion, while China exported goods worth US$104.195 billion to Russia during the 11m, an increase of 4% compared to the same period in 2023.
Finding mechanisms to regain trade growth will be a major feature of Russia-China bilateral trade in 2025, with next year’s trends largely dependent upon the policy of the incoming Trump administration in the United States. A solution for Russia and China would be to connect their own financial settlement systems, yet it remains to be discussed with the incoming administration. Trump has threatened ‘100% tariffs’ on imported goods from any country that refuses to use the US dollar in transactions, but this is negligible in Russia’s case and would be both impractical to implement in non-US trade as countries use their own currencies all the time. Imposing 100% tariffs on China’s exports to the United States would create huge problems with US supply chains – China’s exports to the US were worth about US$520 billion during 2024.
Quite how Russia and China manage to get growth – if at all – into their 2025 bilateral trade volumes is somewhat Trump dependent.
However, to some extent however the reliance of Russia-China trade volumes doesn’t tell the whole supply chain story either, what is also important is the impact of the shadow markets and the actual product mix. While China officially imports huge amounts of oil and gas from Russia, that figure may well be largely than officially recorded, due to Russia deploying a fleet of ‘shadow’ tankers whose deliveries may not be reflected in official customs tallies. The same is true of other vital components in trade and commodities, with Russia now also sourcing from a far more global, disparate market than ever before.
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