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Marrakech – China and Morocco marked ten years of their strategic partnership on Tuesday evening at a reception hosted by Chinese Ambassador Yu Jinsong at the Palais des Congrès Bouregreg in Rabat, where sovereignty framed the message from both governments.
Yu placed the question of core national interests at the center of her address. “Sovereignty is a priority for each of us,” she told guests, “and we will firmly support each other on questions touching our fundamental interests.”
She presented stability as the wider purpose of the relationship: “We will make the stability and predictability of Sino-Moroccan relations an answer to the upheavals of the world.”
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The occasion also saw the unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp issued by Barid Al-Maghrib in partnership with the Chinese Embassy in Rabat. The stamp pairs two UNESCO World Heritage sites – the historic ramparts of Marrakech and the Great Wall of China – as a symbol of the ties between the two countries and of connection across the geographical distance separating them.
The ambassador traced the relationship to a long history. She cited the medieval travels of Ibn Battuta toward the Orient and recalled that Morocco was among the first African and Arab states to recognize the People’s Republic of China.
She referenced the first high-level encounter 63 years ago, between Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and King Hassan II, and noted that later visits to China by King Mohammed VI had deepened the bond.
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For Yu, 2016 was the turning point. At Xi Jinping’s invitation, King Mohammed VI carried out a state visit to China, and the two heads of state agreed to build a strategic partnership grounded in mutual respect, equality, and shared benefit. “Ten years passed like a flash,” she said, “but during them our friendship grew stronger.”
She used the moment to thank Morocco directly. “I would like to express my sincere thanks and best wishes to all those who support and encourage Sino-Moroccan friendship,” she said, depicting the period as “ten years of mutual trust and reciprocal support.”
China, she added, “thanks Morocco for its constant support on China’s core interests.” She also voiced a hope for “prosperity and happiness for China and Morocco, and an even brighter future for the strategic partnership in the decade to come.”
She then listed moments she said gave the decade its substance. In 2020, China supplied Morocco with vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, after the Al Haouz earthquake, Xi sent a message to King Mohammed VI, and Beijing moved quickly to offer support.
In November 2024, Xi met Crown Prince Moulay El Hassan in Casablanca, a meeting she described as giving the relationship fresh impetus. In September 2025, the two foreign ministers signed a memorandum to widen their strategic dialogue mechanism.
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Trade records, investment drive, and people-to-people momentum
On economics, Yu reported a symbolic double record: bilateral trade passed $10 billion in 2025, with China now Morocco’s third trading partner and among the kingdom’s leading emerging sources of investment.
She pointed to progress on the Mohammed VI Tanger Tech City and to cooperation in renewable energy, textiles, and the automotive sector, which she linked to Morocco’s industrial upgrading. Morocco, she affirmed, was the first North African country to sign a Belt and Road cooperation plan.
Human exchanges formed the third strand. Since 2016, Morocco has granted Chinese citizens visa exemption, and the country has grown popular with Chinese tourists.
The Chinese Cultural Center opened in Rabat in 2018 and, with three Confucius Institutes, promotes Chinese culture. China, she indicated, is increasingly a study destination for young Moroccans, while Chinese medical teams have worked in Morocco for more than half a century.
Nine months into her posting, Yu confirmed the strength of the relationship lay with the two peoples. She cited a young Moroccan who jumped into the water to save a life in Hangzhou, Chinese firms that helped communities hit by flooding, students learning Chinese in the Confucius Institutes, Moroccan hospitality during Ramadan, and Chinese and Moroccan staff working side by side in Chinese companies.
She closed with commitments. “China is ready to work with Morocco on zero-tariff measures so that more Moroccan products enter Chinese homes,” she offered, adding that Beijing would treat the partnership as “a model of China-Africa, China-Arab and South-South cooperation.”
She also cast the relationship as a meeting of civilizations: “China and Morocco, as two great civilizations, will be pioneers of dialogue between cultures.”
With 2026 designated a year of China-Africa cultural and people-to-people exchanges, she pledged to ease Moroccan travel to China and deepen cooperation in tourism, culture, arts, and sports. She also announced an Ambassador’s Scholarship to fund Moroccan students studying in China.
A centuries-old bond turned strategic alignment
Speaking for Morocco, Fouad Yazourh, Director General of Bilateral Relations and Regional Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dated the partnership to May 11, 2016, when King Mohammed VI and Xi sealed it during the monarch’s state visit.
He noted that 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of both the partnership and that visit, and described Xi’s November 2024 stop in Casablanca, where the Crown Prince received him on the King’s instruction, as further consolidation.
Yazourh set the ties in a longer frame. “If diplomatic relations were officially established in 1958, the links between our two peoples are centuries old,” he explained, tracing them from the Silk Road to Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth-century journey to China.
He quoted the Tang poet Wang Bo: “As long as there is somewhere a friend who understands us, the ends of the earth are as close as a neighborhood.” He also recalled October 1960, when then-Crown Prince Hassan II told the UN General Assembly that the People’s Republic should be restored to its rights and recognized as the sole legitimate representative of China at the United Nations.
He described relations that “stand out for their constancy, their stability and their resolutely strategic character,” resting on mutual political trust and respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.
He pointed to a convergence between Morocco’s royal Atlantic initiatives – Atlantic access for the Sahel states, the African Atlantic States process, and the African Atlantic gas pipeline – and China’s Belt and Road, Global Development, Global Security, Global Civilization, and Global Governance initiatives.
The September 2025 visit to Beijing by Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, which established the strategic dialogue mechanism between the two foreign ministries, was a major step, according to Yazourh.
He named China as Morocco’s third economic partner and pointed to room for growth in the green economy, energy transition, scientific research, agriculture, food security, training, culture, and health.
For Rabat, Beijing functions less as an alternative to the West than as leverage within it, diversifying dependencies at a moment of accelerating global realignment through a friction-free pragmatism: a transactional, ideology-light partnership in which neither capital lectures the other.
