Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed the China-Tajikistan Treaty on Permanent Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 12, the political capstone of Rahmon’s four-day state visit.
The two leaders also signed a joint statement on deepening the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership in the new era and witnessed the signing of roughly 31 intergovernmental cooperation documents covering trade, investment, artificial intelligence, green mining, agriculture, culture, education, housing, inspection and quarantine, and market supervision.
The partnership had been elevated to “comprehensive strategic cooperative” status during Xi’s July 2024 visit to Dushanbe; the treaty now anchors it in a binding instrument.
The day before, Tajik and Chinese companies signed more than 50 agreements projected to attract over $8 billion in investment. A “Tajik-China Digital Business Connect” IT forum yielded cooperation deals worth $647 million. Rahmon and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank President Zou Jiayi signed a long-term investment plan committing more than $800 million in new AIIB financing on top of the $400 million already allocated to ongoing infrastructure projects.
Bilateral trade reached $790 million in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 50 percent year-on-year. In 2025, China surpassed Russia as Tajikistan’s largest trading partner for the first time in more than two decades, with full-year trade hitting around $4.3 billion by Chinese customs data. Rahmon put accumulated Chinese investment in Tajikistan at nearly $6 billion since 2017 – including roughly $3.5 billion in direct investment – outpacing Russia’s stock of approximately $2 billion. Around $900 million, or 12.5 percent, of the $7 billion in foreign investment Tajikistan received last year came from China, and more than 700 Chinese-capital companies now operate in the country.
The pivot extends beyond bilateral arithmetic. China’s trade with the five Central Asian republics surpassed $100 billion in 2025, a 12 percent year-on-year jump. The first container train from China arrived in Dushanbe in February 2026 through a new corridor crossing Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Last month, Tajik and Chinese officials met in Dushanbe to coordinate access to Tajikistan’s critical minerals – the antimony, gold, lithium, and tungsten underwriting clean-energy supply chains.
China is strengthening its influence in Tajikistan, and Dushanbe today does not have many alternatives for attracting foreign investment. Moscow’s capacity to compete is limited: more than four years into the war in Ukraine, Russia’s resources are stretched and its leverage eroded by domestic xenophobia toward Central Asian migrants. New regulations – mandatory geolocation tracking for foreigners in Moscow and a pre-arrival QR code system for visa-free visitors – have soured Russia’s appeal for Tajik labor. The October 2025 CIS summit in Dushanbe yielded mostly symbolic gestures.
The deepening dependence carries risks Beijing has begun to absorb directly. In late November 2025, two cross-border attacks from Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province killed five Chinese workers at a Chinese-owned gold mine and a China Road and Bridge Corporation site. The Chinese embassy ordered evacuations, and construction on the Dushanbe-China highway was suspended. In March 2026, China agreed to fund nine new border posts along the Afghan-Tajik frontier, adding to at least 15 Chinese-funded security facilities already built over the past decade.
The political alignment was equally explicit. Rahmon told Xi that Taiwan is “an inalienable part of China” and reaffirmed Tajikistan’s adherence to the One China principle. He endorsed Xi’s Global Governance Initiative and credited Beijing with playing an “important role in easing tensions in the Middle East,” a pointed framing given Iran’s continuing war and Central Asia’s exposure to its economic fallout. China, in turn, welcomed Tajikistan as a new signatory to the International Organization for Mediation Convention, Beijing’s vehicle for positioning itself as an alternative to Western-led dispute resolution.
For Tajikistan, the economics still flow in one direction. Of the $4.3 billion in trade reported by Chinese customs in 2025, Tajik exports accounted for $560 million; the remaining $3.7 billion went the other way. The treaty signed in Beijing locks in the framework – but the trade deficit, mineral concessions, and surveillance infrastructure underwriting that framework all give China more cards to play.
