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Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a radical Islamist notorious for leading the massacre of up to 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, will visit China on Tuesday at Beijing’s invitation, the latter country confirmed on Sunday.
An Iranian president has not visited China in at least 20 years, an Iranian presidential aide confirmed on Monday.
Communist China is Iran’s largest trading partner and believed to be one of the prime purchasers of Iranian oil, despite global sanctions on the Islamist regime for its human rights atrocities and rogue nuclear program. China is itself a rogue nation loudly defiant of international law, currently engaging in genocide against multiple Muslim-majority ethnic groups that most of the Islamic world leadership has chosen to ignore or vocally support.
While China does not openly flout sanctions on the Iranian oil industry, “China is the main destination of illicit exports by Iran,” White House special envoy for Iran Robert Malley said in January.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced on Sunday that Raisi would be in China from Tuesday to Thursday, a brief trip reportedly organized after Raisi and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conference held in Uzbekistan in September. The SCO is a China-led economic initiative meant to increase Beijing’s leverage in the economies of its neighbors.
China’s state-run Global Times propaganda newspaper reported, citing the government of Iran, that Raisi and Xi will likely sign multiple “cooperation agreements” and Raisi would also make time for meeting business leaders in pursuit of more economic deals.
“China is Iran’s largest trade partner, IRNA said, citing 10-month statistics from Iranian customs authorities. Iran’s exports to Beijing stood at $12.6 billion, while it imported $12.7 billion worth of goods from China,” the Global Times observed.
Iran is a member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a sprawling global infrastructure plan in which China offers predatory loans to poor countries that it later uses to undermine their sovereignty.
