Uzbekistan and China are moving to deepen cooperation across mining, mineral processing, and nuclear energy, as President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed a broader economic partnership at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek. Alongside a shared ambition to raise bilateral trade from roughly $18 billion last year to $30 billion, the two leaders singled out mining and the extraction and processing of mineral resources as priority areas for expanded industrial cooperation.
The resource-sector focus sits within a much larger investment relationship: an estimated $60 billion in ongoing joint investment projects and more than 6,000 joint ventures are already active in Uzbekistan. Metallurgy was named specifically among the priority industrial sectors, alongside energy, chemicals, and high technologies — a signal that Chinese capital and technical expertise are expected to flow further into Uzbekistan’s mining and metals value chain, from raw extraction through to processing and downstream materials.
On the nuclear side, Uzbekistan reiterated its intent to attract Chinese companies into peaceful nuclear energy projects, positioning this alongside conventional and renewable power as part of a broader energy diversification strategy. This comes as Tashkent has been actively courting international partners for both large-scale and small modular reactor projects, and China’s inclusion in that mix points to growing competition among global nuclear vendors for a foothold in Central Asia’s emerging civil nuclear market.
Supporting infrastructure for these ambitions is also advancing: the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, currently under construction, is expected to strengthen Eurasian transport connectivity under the Belt and Road Initiative — a corridor that would also serve as a logistics backbone for moving mined and processed materials to Chinese and regional markets.
Taken together, the mining and nuclear commitments reflect a shift in the Uzbekistan-China relationship beyond trade volumes and consumer manufacturing (such as the BYD electric vehicle partnership) toward deeper integration in resource extraction, materials processing, and energy security — areas where China’s demand for critical minerals and Uzbekistan’s mineral wealth and nuclear ambitions increasingly align.
