How China's Rise is Changing the Middle East

Anoushiravan Ehteshami, Niv Horesh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000357172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the extent to which China's rise is changing the economic, security, political, and social-cultural aspects of the Middle East – a region of significant strategic importance to the West and of increasing importance to the East. With its growing dependence on Middle East oil and gas, China has more at stake in this region than any other Asian power and, not surprisingly, has begun increasing its engagement with the region, with profound implications for other stakeholders. The book charts the history of China's links with the Middle East, discusses China's involvement with each of the major countries of the region, considers how China's rise is reshaping Middle Easterners' perceptions of China and the Chinese people, and examines the very latest developments.

1 Introduction

China’s Mideast posture in global perspective

On 7 April 2017, President Trump’s then five-year-old granddaughter serenaded President Xi Jinping and first lady Peng Liyuan with a popular Chinese folk song during their visit at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. On the same day, over dinner, Trump reportedly disclosed to Xi the fact that the US had just rained down missiles on the Syrian army in response to its use of chemical weapons on civilians, children included.¹ That the Syrian crisis should feature centre stage, even if for a fleeting moment, during Xi’s first state visit to the United States speaks to the rising significance of the Middle East in the larger scheme of Sino-American relations. There is broad scholarly consensus, in turn, that the nature of Sino-American relations overall is destined to shape the twenty-first century.²

As an emerging economic superpower, post-Mao China’s global imprint has attracted much scholarly attention. The debate is no longer about whether China will trump the United States as the world’s largest economy this century, but about when it is likely to do so. Sure, there are differences of opinion about the methodology of the numbers and issues relating to the ‘middle-income trap’ that China might be becoming caught in, but most commentators expect China to overcome its domestic debt crisis, remaining structural problems in its production chains, institutional corruption, and even its testing environmental problems to emerge as world leader. Of course, global leadership will of necessity require political changes, liberalization, at home, which will test the governing system to its limits. But a stable economy and continuing social prosperity can arguably allow for the necessary changes to allow China to manage positioning itself as the leader of the post-American order. Focus on China has also spun much interest in China’s global role and economic, political, and cultural footprint.

However, curiously, studies of China’s presence in the Middle East remain far outweighed by the literature on Chinese engagement with Africa, Latin America, Central, South, and Southeast Asia.³ Despite China’s rapidly changing energy profile in the 1990s and shifts in its interest in Central and West Asia, scholarly research on China’s role and policies towards the western side of Asia remained thin. While literature on China’s Middle East/West Asia role has grown since the 2000s, coverage now appears to be driven by energy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or superpower politics. There still exists an imbalance, we feel. So, this book is aimed at correcting this imbalance, on three levels. Hailing as we do from different personal and disciplinary backgrounds, we seek to, first, explore the extent to which contemporary Chinese policy vis-à-vis the Middle East is different to the one obtaining during the Mao era (1949–1976). We then seek to uncover the economic rationale underpinning China’s presence in the Middle East at present. And finally, but most importantly, we seek to explain how China’s economic brawn might be changing perceptions of China across the region, as well as Chinese perceptions of the region. This is therefore a book preoccupied with soft power just as much as it aims to strategically construe the meaning of Middle Eastern internal rivalries to the global competition among the big global powers.

As one might well expect to find in a study about a region as troubled as the Middle East, we will of course mention in passing oil output and trade-volume figures in addition to hoary facts about arms sales and military conflicts. However, these dimensions of China’s presence in the Middle East have been addressed in discrete studies elsewhere.⁴ Where we believe this volume makes for an original, holistic, and extensive contribution to the literature is in providing a wide-angle yet historically framed snapshot of elite attitudes to do with China’s presence in the Middle East based on primary sources from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and – of course – China itself.

Before we leave the floor to voices from China and the region, we will recapitulate in the next chapter the history of China’s engagement in the Middle East. Our introductory chapter will consider the past sediments that sometimes colour, if not impact on, Chinese strategic thinking about the Middle East. The chapter will start by identifying the overt as well as subterranean narratives that have carried over from China’s pre-modern and late-Imperial era into the Republican era (1912–1949). Then it will aim at highlighting the extent to which these narratives informed the Middle East policy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Mao Zedong era (1949–1976), post-Mao era (1976–2012), and under the current order, headed by President Xi Jinping (2012–).

The main argument put forward in the following pages is that, while historical factors might perhaps help explain tactical continuity in Chinese rhetoric in relation to the Middle East across different periods, Chinese approaches to the region have been primarily reshaped since the early 1990s by virtue of external exigency. The end of the Cold War and China’s increasingly acute energy dependency in the twenty-first century have played a significant role in shaping China’s approach to the Middle East and North Africa region. Systemic change and domestic conditions, in other words, combined to bring China closer to the western borders of Asia. China is no stranger to the Middle East, however. Indeed, Chinese prestige in the region was at a high point following the 1955 Bandung Conference, but it soon plummeted through much of the remaining Mao era. That is to say, with a momentary exception in South Yemen,⁵ China was never able to usurp significant geostrategic space in the Middle East from either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Notably, Chinese rapprochement with Washington in the early 1970s took two more decades to translate into a major thaw with two of the region’s key players, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Finally, we watch with great concern the prospects of further conflict as the deepening of civil unrest and political instability across the region coinciding with the global competition between the USA and China. Both have strategic interests in this region, and it is the sub-region of the Persian Gulf in particular – for its hydrocarbons deposits and geopolitical weight – which has been singled out as a potential theatre of competition for the two global giants. So we will try to extrapolate Chinese strategic choices into the next few decades, with particular focus on the ways and means by which China might wish to re-position itself vis-à-vis Russia and Iran, on the one hand, and the USA, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, on the other.

This first chapter is then followed by a series of case studies spanning what we identified as the key sets of bilateral relations that would shape the future of China’s posture in the Middle East in the decades to come. By default, these are also set to impact on the quality of US–China relations more broadly: Sino-Iranian, Sino-Saudi, Sino-Egyptian, Sino-Turkish, and Sino-Israeli relations. In the final chapter, we weave together our respective findings for each set of bilateral relations into what we believe will be the most likely course of Chinese engagement in the region in the Xi Jinping era (2012–), with particular focus on his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

This study thereby skirts the Maghreb Arab countries and Sudan, not least because they are fairly well covered in the extensive literature on Sino-African relations.⁶ Nevertheless, the literature about the Maghreb resonates with much of the same themes that emanate from our case studies, such as Chinese preoccupation with energy-source diversification, Arab admiration at China’s economic achievements at home alongside anxiety at the growing trade deficits with China. As will be shown later, Egypt is the only country where the discourse on China is largely devoid of such anxiety.

In that sense, our project builds on – but also goes well beyond – Zambelis and Gentry’s pertinent study, published back in 2008. We agree that some thought leaders in the Arab world may still look to contemporary China as ‘a successful political and economic development model worthy of emulation’, and that these positive sentiments may stem in no small measure from ‘nostalgic feelings of solidarity dating back to the height of Arab nationalism and China’s preeminent role bolstering international Third World solidarity and anticolonial movements’.⁷ We also agree that these sentiments prevail despite the fact that strategic concerns are driving Beijing’s regional policies rather than ideological commitments. However, we critically point to another key strand of the China discourse that is prevalent not just in the Arab world, but also in Iran, Turkey, and Israel – one that is deeply suspicious of Chinese strategic motives and concerned at China’s economies of scale.

There are other notable differences that situate the Maghreb, North and South Sudan outside the remit of our study. First, China did not have substantive direct contact with that region until the middle of the twentieth century, thus hollowing our historical pursuit. Second, the Maghreb and the Horn of Arica regions as a whole are nowhere nearly as important as the Gulf region in terms of Chinese oil and gas supply. Third, Algeria and Libya in particular saw in the early 2000s an influx of Chinese labourers on a scale that was arguably much larger as compared with the countries under study here, and is more consonant with Chinese patterns of engagement with sub-Saharan Africa.⁸

The rebellion against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya temporarily halted that influx. Between February and March 2011, China was forced to evacuate over 35,000 of its nationals from Libya by sea at a cost of $152 million. Because of increasing domestic pressure to protect the growing population of Chinese working for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in war-torn countries – particularly in oil fields – Beijing has since taken a more proactive approach.⁹ The Libya evacuation has fed into ongoing efforts to make the Chinese navy more of a blue-water force to be reckoned with. As part of these efforts, China opened in 2017 its first off-shore military base in Djibouti, and is planning another one in Gwadar, Pakistan.¹⁰ Geography points to the strategic importance of these sites and the value China’s attributing to forward basing.

While China established diplomatic relations with Libya only in 1978, it had enthusiastically supported the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) struggle against French colonial rule earlier on. When the FLN declared the Algerian provisional government in December 1958, China was the first non-Arab country to recognize it. By some accounts, the FLN during Ahmed Ben Bella’s leadership even professed to be ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: China’s Mideast posture in global perspective
• 2 The Chinese–Middle Eastern encounter in broader historical perspective: from the Han to the Qing dynasty
• 3 China’s presence in the Middle East in the long twentieth century, 1912–2012
• 4 Eyeing military alliance? Sino-Iranian mutual strategic perceptions leading onto the Trump era
• 5 Chinese strategic perceptions of Saudi Arabia
• 6 A model for self-development? Egyptian perceptions of China since 2012
• 7 Our ‘new best friend’? Turkish perceptions of China since 2012
• 8 The PRC’s slowly improving relations with Israel
• 9 Conclusion: China is changing the world and with it the Middle East
• Index