Beijing Wants the Moroccan Passport, Not the Market

Beijing asked Morocco for a free trade deal it does not need. It wants the kingdom's road into Europe and Africa, with the King's stability as collateral.

Source: KIM KYUNG-HOON/AFP

By June 2026, Beijing had formally asked Rabat to negotiate a free trade agreement, a request the kingdom describes only as under reflection while it studies the impact and holds back from formal talks.

At face value, this looks like a good trade opportunity. A pact with the world’s second-largest economy would open 1.4 billion consumers to Moroccan exporters and loosen a dependence on Europe that has shaped the kingdom’s trade map for a generation. However, since 1 May 2026, Moroccan goods already enter China almost entirely duty free, under a unilateral exemption Beijing extended across Africa that expires in 2028. Morocco holds the export upside now, without signing anything. What an agreement would add is the reciprocal half, an obligation on Rabat to open its own market to Chinese goods permanently and to convert an informal arrangement into a binding one. Beijing is not offering Morocco a market. It is asking Morocco for a passport to Western and African markets.

What Beijing is actually asking for

The value Morocco carries for China is not its 38 million consumers. It is the stack of trade agreements that lets goods made on Moroccan soil enter the markets China is being shut out of. A lithium battery assembled near Kenitra leaves Tangier stamped as Moroccan and crosses into the European Union at 0%, rather than the 45% the bloc now levies on electric vehicles shipped from China. In recent years Chinese firms have committed close to 10 billion dollars to Moroccan industry, including a 1.3 billion dollar battery gigafactory near Kenitra that may grow to 6.5 billion, a cathode plant at Tangier, a battery materials joint venture at Jorf Lasfar tied to the royal holding company, and a tyre plant inside a zone designed to host 200 Chinese firms. Morocco gets jobs, plants and the prestige of an industrial story. China gets tariff cover, European proximity, local phosphates and cobalt, and a politically stable base from which to outflank Western trade walls.