Mongolia opened a new rail line to China on Friday that the landlocked country’s prime minister said would help it weather the zero-Covid controls that have disrupted cross-border trade with its powerful neighbour.“The opening of the new railway is historically important for Mongolia,” Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai said in an interview with the Financial Times ahead of the launch of the Zuunbayan-Khangi rail link, which will transport commodities from mines including Rio Tinto’s Oyu Tolgoi project to the world’s second-largest economy.
After almost three years of disruption caused by Covid-19 and China’s strict epidemic controls, cross-border trade is finally nearing pre-pandemic levels. “Currently an average of 1,300 [commodity] cars are leaving Mongolia’s borders each day,” the prime minister said. “In 2019 it was 1,500.”
Mongolia’s economy grew 3.7 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter this year, its biggest rise since 2019. Economic output rebounded just 1.4 per cent in 2021 after a 4.6 per cent fall in 2020.