When Ashik Chowdhury, the executive chairman of the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority, was recently asked about Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s upcoming trip to China, his response caught the room off guard.
“Many issues will come up,” Chowdhury remarked, “starting with defense.”
For a diplomatic trip strictly billed around trade, investment, and business, it was an early, blunt admission of how heavy the agenda will be.
Rahman is scheduled to land in China on June 23 for a four-day official visit, preceded by a two-day stopover in Malaysia. While the newly elected government has touted the tour under its “Bangladesh First” foreign policy doctrine, the reality awaiting Dhaka in Beijing will go well beyond balance sheets.
The trip begins with an economic veneer. Rahman’s first stop will be Dalian for the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos — formally, the 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, running from June 23-25.
He is expected to hold talks with WEF Interim President and CEO Alois Zwinggi before heading to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. By opening at a multilateral economic forum, Dhaka gets to frame the visit through a commercial lens before diving into the high-stakes strategic negotiations waiting in the wings.
The economic stakes are genuinely massive. Bangladesh currently has financing proposals worth over $9 billion pending with the Chinese government, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank.
Dhaka is directly seeking $4.34 billion from Beijing to back several critical, long-delayed initiatives — among them the highly contested Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, the expansion and modernization of Mongla Port, and the Chinese Economic and Industrial Zone in Anwara, Chattogram.
The groundwork on Anwara is moving fast. On June 16, the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council cleared a 41.89 billion taka project to develop the zone’s supporting infrastructure: a four-lane road, a multipurpose jetty capable of handling 20,000 deadweight-tonne vessels, a central effluent treatment plant, and gas, power, and water systems across the 800-acre site. China Road and Bridge Corporation has been nominated to carry out construction.
In all, officials expect around a dozen memoranda of understanding to be signed during the trip, spanning electric vehicle technology transfers, renewable energy, banking cooperation and a potential currency swap. Rahman will also serve as chief guest at a Beijing investment conference aimed at drawing Chinese capital directly.
But commerce alone does not explain why BIDA’s chairman put defense at the absolute top of the list.
Bangladesh is quietly finalizing a $2.2 billion deal to buy 20 Chinese-made J-10CE multirole fighter jets. The package allocates roughly $60 million per aircraft — $1.2 billion for the 20-jet fleet — with the remaining $820 million covering training, logistics, spare parts, transport, insurance and infrastructure.
The acquisition would make Bangladesh only the second country in South Asia, after Pakistan, to operate the J-10CE, and would represent the most significant expansion of Chinese military hardware in the region in years.
The previous interim administration had already cleared the deal in principle following extensive military reviews, and the current government is now driving it across the finish line.
Air Chief Marshal Hasan Mahmood Khan heads an 11-member inter-ministerial committee tasked with finalizing government-to-government terms, payment schedules and delivery timelines.
Internal momentum for the Chinese jets surged after Operation Sindoor, the four-day India-Pakistan border conflict of May 2025. While New Delhi disputed many of Islamabad’s claims, Pakistan’s accounts of the J-10CE’s radar performance against Indian Rafales likely shifted calculations in Dhaka, convincing military planners that the aircraft offered the best available combination of combat capability and cost, particularly after sticker shock from French alternatives.
It is not an isolated defense procurement from China. In January this year, the Bangladesh Air Force signed a government-to-government agreement with CETC International — the export arm of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation — to establish a domestic unmanned aerial vehicle manufacturing and assembly facility in Dhaka, with full technology transfer. It stands as the most consequential transfer of Chinese military technology to Bangladesh to date.
Washington is no doubt watching all of this carefully. US Ambassador to Bangladesh Brent Christensen has explicitly flagged the long-term risks of strategic over-reliance on Beijing.
To provide an alternative, Washington has put an aggressive military package on the table, including F/A-18 Super Hornets, Apache attack helicopters, NASAMS air defense systems, and MQ-9 Reaper drones — a line-up calibrated to match what China is offering in both capability and signal.
Simultaneously, long-stalled talks over the GSOMIA and ACSA defense frameworks have suddenly accelerated. The catalyst was a congratulatory letter dated February 18 from President Donald Trump to Prime Minister Rahman — a letter that went well beyond pleasantries.
“I hope you will take decisive action to complete the routine defense agreements that would finally give your military access to high-end, American-made equipment,” Trump wrote, pressing Dhaka to sign both pacts. Rahman’s government has insisted that no security agreement will be concluded unless it protects core national interests, but the pressure is unmistakable.
The deeper problem for Bangladesh is that Washington has begun tying trade access directly to security compliance. A reciprocal trade agreement signed on February 9 by the outgoing interim government embedded significant conditionalities alongside its tariff concessions.
The deal restricts Bangladesh from purchasing nuclear reactors, fuel rods, or enriched uranium from countries deemed to jeopardize US interests — a clause with direct implications for future energy deals with China or Russia. The agreement also commits Dhaka to $3.5 billion in American agricultural purchases, including wheat, soybeans and cotton.
The tariff relief that accompanied the deal came in two stages: Washington cut its levy on Bangladeshi exports from 37% to 20% effective August 1, 2025, as initial negotiations concluded, and then further to 19% when the broader trade deal was formalized in February.
The deal also includes a provision — Article 5.3 — that removes the supplementary reciprocal tariff surcharge on garments made using American cotton and man-made fiber, though economists have noted that the underlying base tariff remains, making the benefit narrower in practice than in the headlines.
Dhaka knows precisely how this game is played. The $3.7 billion formal order for 14 Boeing aircraft — eight 787-10 Dreamliners, two 787-9 Dreamliners and four 737-8 MAX jets — signed by Biman Bangladesh Airlines on April 30, 2026, was widely understood as the commercial fulfillment of a commitment made inside the February trade deal. It has been widely regarded as a geopolitical statement dressed up as aviation procurement, with no one seriously arguing otherwise.
Beijing has not let the contrast go unnoticed. At a meeting with Bangladesh’s then-foreign affairs adviser in Kuala Lumpur last July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointedly observed that China extends 100% duty-free access to Bangladeshi products, and called the weight of American tariffs on one of the world’s least developed countries “neither reasonable nor ethical.”
India has its own set of alarms. Speaking at an Observer Research Foundation event in New Delhi in July last year, Chief of Defense Staff General Anil Chauhan said that a possible convergence of interests between China, Pakistan and Bangladesh could carry serious implications for regional stability — placing the question of Bangladesh’s strategic alignment at the center of India’s security calculations.
Nothing in that calculus agitates New Delhi more than the Teesta project. Bangladesh has formally requested a $550 million Chinese loan for Phase 1 of the Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project — a plan that would dredge 140 million cubic meters of sediment, reclaim 171 square kilometers of land and rebuild hundreds of kilometers of embankments across the northern districts.
The issue is not the water but the geography as a whole. The project’s footprint runs adjacent to the Siliguri Corridor — the narrow, 22-kilometer-wide strip of land that connects mainland India to its eight northeastern states, and the single most strategically sensitive piece of terrain in South Asia.
Adding to New Delhi’s unease are persistent reports that Bangladesh plans to upgrade its Lalmonirhat airbase, a World War II-era facility sitting less than 20 kilometers from the Indian border, with Chinese technical assistance.
India has moved swiftly in response. In May last year, the Airports Authority of India sent a team to survey the long-defunct Kailashahar airfield in Tripura’s Unakoti district — the first concrete step toward reviving a base that had been non-operational for over three decades.
While Dhaka sees essential domestic modernization in the form of flood management and upgrading its long-neglected air force, New Delhi sees a Chinese military footprint edging toward its most vulnerable chokepoint.
The shadow hanging over this entire visit is July 2024, when the then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina went to Beijing chasing a rumored $5 billion budget support package, only to return early and reportedly frustrated, with just $136 million in commitments, in the form of a 1 billion yuan grant.
Rahman will arrive in China in a meaningfully different position. He carries a cleaner project pipeline, Executive Committee of the National Economic Council clearances already secured for key industrial zones and the backing of a powerful parliamentary majority.
He also faces stubborn domestic challenges. Severe gas and electricity shortages continue to hobble the factories that Chinese investors would seek to build or fill, and the Bangladesh bureaucracy has a well-documented record of choking approved projects for years before construction actually begins.
Ultimately, Rahman’s trip will not be judged by the number of MOUs he brings back from Beijing. It will be judged by whether Dhaka can execute a precise high-wire act — pulling in billions in Chinese infrastructure financing and military hardware without triggering a devastating economic backlash from Washington or a security crisis with New Delhi.
Both risks are real, and neither is easily resolved as Bangladesh moves decisively toward Beijing.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based journalist, writer and researcher with over a decade of experience in professional journalism. He is also the author of 10 published books and a researcher focusing on Bangladesh’s media industry and its intersections with broader social and academic fields.
