Russo-Chinese trade turnover from January to October grew by 30.9% year on year, amounting to $115.66 billion, China’s General Customs Administration reported on Sunday.

Exports to the Russian Federation in 10 months increased 30.6%, to about $52.9 billion. Imports of Russian goods and services to China grew by 31.2%, to $62.76 billion.

In October alone, the volume of trade between the two countries reached $13 billion.

Trade between Russia and China in the reporting period already surpassed the figures for the whole of pre-pandemic 2019, when it was around $110.75 billion. The indicator slightly dropped in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, decreasing by 2.9% to $107.76 billion.

The growth in trade between the two countries comes amid continuing difficulties at the border. Crossing procedures introduced by Beijing at the height of the pandemic last year require that all trucks crossing into China drop their empty trailers for loading on the Chinese side and return to Russia, then go back to pick up the loaded vehicle.

Russia requires that the trailer be picked up by the same truck which took it to the border. This means that one truck has to cross the border four times, which has led to long lines at the border crossing terminals, reportedly numbering up to 1,000 trucks.

Chinese authorities this week asked Russia to conduct a detailed check of the crossing procedures and revise the way trucks with trailers cross the border, as idle time brings daily losses and affects transportation costs. China hopes Russia will switch to a cargo transportation system like the one at a checkpoint between China and Kazakhstan in Xinjiang, which allows any truck to pick up a loaded trailer.

Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi (ETT), one of Mongolia’s largest mining companies, still managed to ship an impressive 15.5 million tons of coal, earning MNT 1.68 trillion, including MNT 1.5 trillion in sales revenue amid chaos of interrupted supply chain procedures due to Covid.

The flagship company also reported a net profit of MNT 149.4 billion and contributed MNT 490.1 billion in taxes and fees to the state budget. Despite being prevented from transporting coal to China, its largest customer, ETT managed to negotiate receipt of advance payment for the coal, which will ship as soon as the borders open. As one the most profound consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been interruptions to the supply chain and a decline in exports and imports due to logistical challenges, this represents a coup for the company, and the people of Mongolia.

According to a recent survey, net exports from Mongolia accounted for 6.2% of the country’s GDP in the second quarter of 2018, falling to 1.9% for the same period in 2021. A 2020 study by the World Bank and the National Statistics Office of Mongolia also found that 28% of Mongolians could be called ‘poor,’ and fears have been voiced that this number could swell to around 43%. Rising prices and shortages of goods are having a substantial impact on the livelihoods of ordinary Mongolians, who find that they have less purchasing power.

In landlocked Mongolia, this longstanding issue has been exacerbated by the pandemic-related closure of several border crossings. Although this situation is somewhat expected in places like Mongolia, the socio-economic ramifications of the pandemic have been unusually severe. The recent distribution of dividends by ETT are therefore most welcome, and play a significant role in helping to rescue the Mongolia and its citizens from an increasingly difficult situation.

ETT was named the best Mongolian taxpayer of 2020 and is one of the top 100 companies in the country – a confirmation of its continuing contribution to Mongolia and her people.

Mongolian coal producer SouthGobi Resources Ltd. has been forced to suspend mining operations from this month after an outbreak of Covid-19 closed the border to its customers in China, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mongolia has seen coal exports dwindle since April because of the pandemic, a contributing factor to the shortages of the fuel that have plagued Chinese industry in recent months.

Beijing has continued to push Mongolia for more supply, but to little avail. SouthGobi Resource, one of its biggest miners, reported in August that its sales fell to about 100,000 tons in the second quarter, from about 500,000 tons the year before. Mongolia’s total exports to China in the third quarter sank below 1 million tons, just a third of the volume reported in the prior year.

China imported more than 30 million tons of coal in September, so the volumes at risk from the border suspension aren’t particularly significant. But most of Mongolia’s coal exports are of the higher grade used in the steel industry, and are particularly prized by Chinese mills after the government banned similar supplies from Australia a year ago.

The Hong Kong-based, Toronto-listed SouthGobi Resource said its existing coal inventories should be sufficient to satisfy demand for at least four months once coal exports to China resume.

Source: Bloomberg

The Russian Export Center (REC) expects trade turnover between Russia and China to reach a record $130 billion in 2021, the head of the state institution Veronika Nikishina said during an online conference on Monday.

“This year, [Russia-China] trade shows rapid growth: in the first eight months of 2021, trade turnover increased by 30% to $86 billion... In the summer, trade between our two countries reached a record level of $12 billion per month. And there is no doubt that it will also be a record high by the end of the year,” Nikishina said.

She noted that Russian exports to China jumped by 34% to $42.3 billion in the reporting period, while imports from China grew by 27%, to $43.5 billion.

According to REC estimates, the turnover will exceed $130 billion by the year’s end, topping the record $111 billion reached in pre-pandemic 2019. Nikishina noted that China has been Russia's main foreign trade partner since 2010, dominating Russian imports since 2008 and exports since 2017.

China’s share in Russia's trade amounted to 17.7% in the first eight months of this year, with a 14.2% share in exports and 23.3% in imports. According to the official, even the Covid-19 pandemic was unable to hinder the countries’ efforts to strengthen mutual trade.

“In 2020, Russian-Chinese trade turned out to be very resistant to the crisis. Amid the pandemic and the fall in world prices, its decline was only 6.7%, while Russia's trade with other countries decreased by 16.6%,” Nikishina said.

China has been Russia’s main importer of non-primary non-energy goods since 2016. According to the official, deliveries of these goods have been growing for seven consecutive years, and the trend continues through 2021.

“For eight months of 2021, their deliveries amounted to $11.4 billion, exceeding the level of 2020 by 19%,” Nikishina specified. Products that showed the largest growth are copper, aluminum, direct reduced iron, copper wire, fertilizers, lumber, oilseeds, crustaceans, paper and cardboard.

In the first nine months of 2021, mortgage loans worth MNT 787.2 billion were disbursed to 10.5 thousand borrowers through the source of the central bank.

This is an average of MNT 87.9 billion in loans issued per month in 2021, according to the Bank of Mongolia today.

In October and November of this year, the Bank of Mongolia will provide financing of MNT 40 billion to commercial banks for mortgage loans, while banks will disburse loans worth MNT 26.7 billion from their own resources.

The Bank of Mongolia stated that the preparation is underway to fully transfer the mortgage loan program to the Government by 2023 and informed that the bank will ensure the continuity of the program until then.

Nov. 2 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia recorded 1,021 COVID-19 cases over the past 24 hours, bringing the national tally to 362,526, the country's health ministry said on Tuesday.

Half of the new cases were detected in the national capital Ulan Bator, which is hardest hit by the pandemic due to the highly contagious Delta variant, the ministry said.

Meanwhile, 10 more COVID-19 patients aged over 40 died in the past day, taking the nationwide death toll to 1,682.

About 65.8 percent of its population of around 3.4 million has received two COVID-19 vaccine doses, with over 418,000 Mongolians having taken a booster dose.

The government has urged the public to avoid mass gatherings, wear masks in public, and receive a booster shot.

The chief executive officer of Rio Tinto Group, the world’s biggest iron ore miner, said it might take until the end of this decade before the company has a clear view on how it will become fully carbon neutral.

Rio Tinto’s Jakob Stausholm last month laid out plans to spend $7.5 billion to decarbonize its assets over the next decade and help drive a 50% reduction in its operational emissions by 2030.

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Yet, speaking at the COP26 summit in Glasgow on Monday, the CEO said technological breakthroughs are needed for the mining giant to go further.

“You can’t solve 100% of CO2 without some breakthroughs,” Stausholm said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

“By 2030, we want to have halved our carbon footprint, and I want by 2030 to have a very clear pathway, without a lot of uncertainty, towards zero.”

(By Thomas Biesheuvel)

Glasgow /MONTSAME/. President of Mongolia U.Khurelsukh is attending the World Leaders Summit: 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) being held in Glasgow, UK.

As organizers of the summit, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Boris Johnson and Secretary-General of the UN António Guterres greeted President U.Khurelsukh to express gratitude for making time to attend the summit in-person.

State and government heads of over 130 countries are attending the summit being organized in the framework of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference taking place between October 30 and November 12.

The summit aims to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement by further defining the commitments made by countries and gathering financing in the framework of the measures to be taken for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

Mongolia aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the main cause of climate change, by 22.7 percent by the year of 2030. With the introduction of new technologies and innovative solutions, and the establishment of a sustainable system for green financing, it is planned to further increase the reduction of GHG, reaching 27.2 percent.

On October 25, the Foreign Ministry of Mongolia initiated “U.N. Week” to mark the 60th anniversary of Mongolia joining the United Nations. Mongolia’s history in the United Nations also serves as a window the country’s foreign policy, geopolitical challenges, as well as perseverance.

It took Mongolia 15 years from its first application to join the U.N. Mongolia’s repeated attempts to join the U.N. were challenged at every step, as superpower competition and geopolitical dynamics hindered these foreign policy goals. The Americans, Russians, and the Chinese were all opposed to Mongolia’s membership in the U.N. under different political circumstances and different timeframes.

Mongolia first attempted to join the U.N. in 1946, just after World War II. The Mongolians at the time believed that the change in world order was perhaps a chance to expand the country’s connections to the outside world.

On June 24, 1946, the prime minister of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR), Choibalsan Khorloo, applied for U.N. membership. Given the post-war mentality, the five permanent members – the Soviet Union, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – were occupied with agendas of their own, which did not directly concern Mongolia. In July 1946, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Herschel Johnson, supported the entry of a bloc of states – including Mongolia, as well as Afghanistan, Albania, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden – into the United Nations. However, A.A. Gromyko, the Soviet representative to the U.N., opposed Mongolia’s membership in the U.N.

The 1950s and 1960s were no better. The Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR ultimately divided other global and regional players as allies and enemies, communists, and capitalists. This global instability did not help Mongolia’s case to join the U.N., since the Soviet Union still had enormous influence in Mongolia. After multiple failed trips to New York, then-Prime Minister Marshall Tsedenbal Yumjaa said in frustration during a December 7, 1961, speech, “For many years, the aspirations of the Mongolian people have been ignored. Because the United States employed discriminatory policies towards the Mongolian People’s Republic and Chiang Kai-shek and his group, who has long lost its reputation in the eyes of the world and the support of its people forever, the Mongolian People’s Republic’s desire to become a member of the U.N. has been protracted for 14 years. It is still unfulfilled.”

Indeed, Mongolia’s admission had become tied up with the conflict between Chiang’s Republic of China (ROC) government on Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, which took over the Chinese mainland in 1949. Chiang still clung to the fiction of representing all of China – which, in his mind, also included Mongolia, despite his government having been pressured into recognizing Mongolia’s independence amid the Chinese civil war. The ROC government, therefore, strenuously opposed Mongolia’s entry into the U.N.

In the summer of 1961 and again in the fall, U.S. President John F. Kennedy voiced to Chiang that the United States would no longer prevent Mongolia from joining the U.N. The United States was aware of both the advantages and the disadvantages of having Mongolia join the U.N. The disadvantages had nothing to do with Mongolia per se but involved geopolitical issues related to Russia and China.

A declassified memo from the JFK era argued that “U.N. membership might provide Outer Mongolia with defenses against further encroachment by the USSR or Peiping [Beijing] in that area. Outer Mongolia will be less isolated, and the world organization would be alert to developments there. It would be a generally popular action for the United States to take in the United Nations.” Disregarding these known advantages, on February 1, 1961, Kennedy’s White House reached the opposite conclusion: “Weighing the foregoing considerations; it appears that on balance our national interest would be best served by continuing our opposition to the admission of Outer Mongolia to the United Nations.”

However, these barriers did not stop Mongolia from pursuing diplomatic relations with other nations around the world. The fact that Mongolia was establishing bilateral relations with other countries, including Western countries, reflected positively on Mongolia’s independence and its foreign policy as a whole. As well-known Mongolian studies scholar C.R. Bawden wrote, “Since joining the U.N. in 1961, after some hard campaigning, Mongolia further consolidated her world status by exchanging diplomatic recognition with a number of Western countries – in the first place in 1963, with the United Kingdom.”

On October 27, 1961, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 166, admitting Mongolia’s to the U.N. with nine votes in favor and one abstention – the United States (the ROC, which still held China’s UNSC seat at the time, did not participated in the vote). On that date 60 years ago, the Mongolian delegation – led by the first deputy minister of the Foreign Ministry of the MPR, D. Tsevegmid, Ambassadors B. Jargalsaikhan and B. Dashtseren, and diplomats O. Damdindorj, B. Orsoo, and B. Vanchin – witnessed a turning point in Mongolia’s history.

Fifteen years since its first application and thanks to the tremendous effort made by Tsedenbal and many before, Mongolia was now a fully fledged member of the U.N.

Since joining the U.N., Mongolia has ratified U.N. treaties and conventions and has been an active member in U.N. peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and North Africa. Mongolia has also participated in UNESCO, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and other significant initiatives. In 2019, the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission recognized Mongolia’s contribution in Western Sahara, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia. and South Sudan.

According to the Mongolian Mission to the U.N, “Mongolia initiated more than 70 resolutions in the General Assembly, of which 10 were adopted in the past five years.” Those include resolutions on “U.N. Literacy Decade,” “Support by the U.N. system of the efforts of Governments to promote and consolidate new and restored democracies,” “Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas,” and “Cooperatives in social development.” In addition, Mongolia’s non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) status positions Mongolia as an important mediation actor within the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) in East Asia .

The Mongolian Foreign Ministry’s U.N. Week included a photo exhibition. Also as part of the event, for the first time in U.N. history, children representing 21 aimags and Ulaanbaatar wrote the U.N. Charter in traditional Mongolian script, Mongol bichig. The Foreign Ministry also organized a scholarly conference, “60 Years of Cooperation Between Mongolia and the U.N., and What is Ahead.” Foreign Minister Battsetseg Batmunkh and the U.N. Resident Coordinator, Tapan Mishra, made remarks to open the conference.

In a congratulatory message, Battsetseg stated:

For the last 60 years, Mongolia fully seized this opportunity, strictly adhered to the Goals and Principles of the UN Charter, and contributed to strengthening international peace and security, promoting social and economic development, and securing human rights, which are the three pillars of the United Nations activities. Today, Mongolia has established diplomatic relations with 193 countries of the world, became a member of more than 80 international and intergovernmental organizations, and acceded to more than 290 international treaties.

As Mongolia continues to be an integral part of the Asia-Pacific, its relations with the United Nations will only strengthen and expand. In the upcoming years, the United Nations and its agencies will play an important role in Mongolia’s implementation of its Vision 2050, a long-term development plan that aims to touch on issues of governance, human rights, education, and becoming a digital nation such as Estonia, Denmark, Israel, and Canada.

By:Bolor Lkhaajav

Bolor Lkhaajav is a researcher specializing in Mongolia, China, Russia, Japan, East Asia, and the Americas. She holds an M.A. in Asia-Pacific Studies from the University of San Francisco.

-Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi (ETT), one of Mongolia's largest mining companies, is helping to alleviate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mongolia through a massive contribution to the fiscus and a renewed commitment to continue investing in local infrastructure mega-projects. The mining giant has also negotiated good trading agreements with China, despite COVID-related obstacles.

Last year, confronted with the chaos of interrupted supply chain procedures due to Covid, ETT still managed to ship an impressive 15.5 million tons of coal, earning MNT 1.68 trillion, including MNT 1.5 trillion in sales revenue. The flagship company also reported a net profit of MNT 149.4 billion and contributed MNT 490.1 billion in taxes and fees to the state budget. Despite being prevented from transporting coal to China, its largest customer, ETT managed to negotiate receipt of advance payment for the coal, which will ship as soon as the borders open. As one the most profound consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been interruptions to the supply chain and a decline in exports and imports due to logistical challenges, this represents a coup for the company, and the people of Mongolia.

According to a recent survey, net exports from Mongolia accounted for 6.2% of the country’s GDP in the second quarter of 2018, falling to 1.9% for the same period in 2021. A 2020 study by the World Bank and the National Statistics Office of Mongolia also found that 28% of Mongolians could be called ‘poor,’ and fears have been voiced that this number could swell to around 43%. Rising prices and shortages of goods are having a substantial impact on the livelihoods of ordinary Mongolians, who find that they have less purchasing power.

In landlocked Mongolia, this longstanding issue has been exacerbated by the pandemic-related closure of several border crossings. Although this situation is somewhat expected in places like Mongolia, the socio-economic ramifications of the pandemic have been unusually severe. The recent distribution of dividends by ETT are therefore most welcome, and play a significant role in helping to rescue the Mongolia and its citizens from an increasingly difficult situation.