TEHRAN – Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Wednesday that 25-year cooperation plan between Iran and China is transparent and there is nothing secret about it.

“If Majlis’ approval is needed, the necessary legal actions will be done and the people will be informed about it transparently. All the stages have been announced and there is nothing secret,” he told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

Zarif noted, “The people feel assured that neither this administration not any other administration will give a handspan of Iran’s soil and will not let exclusive use of a handspan of Iran’s soil.”

The foreign minister also said that the agreement is not finalized yet, however, the two countries are close to reach a deal.

Talking in an open session of the parliament on July 5, Zarif said, “The agreement was discussed in the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Leader of the Islamic Revolution [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]. We announced the issue to the people. In last year’s visit, I took this agreement to China and it was announced. When China responded to our draft, we announced it and when China accepted negotiation with us, the issue was announced,” 
Government spokesman Ali Rabiei said on June 23 that Iran and China have drafted a 25-year plan for comprehensive cooperation which proves failure of the plots to isolate the Islamic Republic.

President Hassan Rouhani has said the strategic partnership is based on a win-win approach.

Li Li, an associate professor at Southwest University (SWU) in China, tells the Tehran Times that Iran-China partnership deal is based on the principles of “mutual national interests”, “fairness” and “reciprocity” and it “challenges U.S. hegemony”.

Foreign media have launched a campaign against the partnership between Iran and China.

“I think such propaganda campaign from the mainstream Western media that are extremely inimical to and feverishly demonize the strategic Iran-China partnership is all too predictable and hardly avoidable. Mainstream media in the West especially in the U.S. have ample reasons to vilify Iran-China relations from their vested interests as they are tightly in the grip of the aggressive and warmongering neocon military-industrial complex and pro-Israeli Jewish lobbies,” Li says.

Jin Liangxiang, a senior research fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, also says China and Iran have every reason to establish and strengthen the comprehensive strategic partnership (CSP). 

Writing in the Tehran Times on Tuesday, Jin said, “Both of the two have long histories of ancient civilizations and have the experience of being humiliated by the West in general in the last two centuries. And both of the two share the same kind of experience of being bullied and sanctioned by the U.S. in the last decades.

These similarities have made the two psychologically closer to each other as the two could easily understand each other's concern for national independence, sovereignty, and the quest for legitimate rights.”

NA/PA