By Joe Cash
BEIJING (Reuters) -The first Chinese evacuees from Iran have started sharing on social media their desperate efforts to reach the Islamic Republic’s borders and the safety of Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as the Israel-Iran air war entered a sixth day.
Several thousand Chinese nationals are thought to reside in oil-rich Iran, according to state media reports highlighting Beijing’s efforts to deepen strategic and commercial ties with the theocratic regime over the past two decades.
“My heart was pounding but amid the haze of war, everything became clear: I packed my bags and tried to evacuate to the embassy,” wrote a Chinese travel blogger under the alias Shuishui Crusoe, a nod to Daniel Defoe’s fictional castaway, Robinson Crusoe.
The travel blogger had decided to leave after sitting through Israel’s overnight bombings last Friday when the conflict began, even as the embassy told advised her to stay put.
Emboldened by news of fellow citizens who made it across to Armenia, 750 km (466 miles) from the Iranian capital Tehran, she chose the same route, arriving by bus in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Monday, a day before China’s embassy officially urged citizens to leave Iran.
China started evacuating its citizens from Tehran to Turkmenistan by overland bus on Tuesday, a distance of 1,150 km (714.58 miles), state-run China News Service reported Wednesday.
More than 700 Chinese nationals have been transferred to places of safety and more than 1,000 more are in the process of being transferred, China’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.
While the embassy emphasised evacuation, some other Chinese netizens still in Iran shared video compilations showing an orderly scenario of well-stocked grocery shops and fruit stalls, with only a couple of clips of large purchases of bottled water.
Most Chinese in Iran are engineers who moved there to work for Chinese firms that have invested just under $5 billion in the country since 2007 – primarily in its oil sector – according to data from the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
If the regime in Tehran is severely weakened or replaced, Beijing loses a key diplomatic foothold in a region long dominated by the U.S. but vital to President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road initiative and its aim to link the world’s second-largest economy with Europe and the Gulf.
China, the world’s leading energy consumer, has also benefited from importing heavily discounted Iranian crude, despite Washington’s sanctions aimed at curbing the trade.
(Reporting by Joe Cash, Tiffany Le, Liz Lee; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Michael Perry)
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