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.

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Rahul Karan Reddy is a 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 about the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute between China and Japan. Rahul was previously a research analyst at the Chennai Center for China Studies (C3S). He is the creator of the India-China Trade dashboard and the Chinese Provincial Development Indicators dashboard. His work has been published in The Diplomat, East Asia Forum, ISDP & Tokyo Review, among others. He can be reached via email at rahulkaran.reddy@gmail.com and @RahulKaranRedd1 on Twitter.

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