China and the Middle East

Venturing into the Maelstrom

James M. Dorsey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319643540
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319643557
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores China's significant economic and security interests in the Middle East and South Asia. To protect its economic and security interests, China is increasingly forced to compromise its long-held foreign policy and defence principles, which include insistence on non-interference in the domestic affairs of others, refusal to envision a foreign military presence, and focus on the development of mutually beneficial economic and commercial relations. The volume shows that China's need to redefine requirements for the safeguarding of its national interests positioned the country as a regional player in competitive cooperation with the United States and the dominant external actor in the region. The project would be ideal for scholarly audiences interested in Regional Politics, China, South Asia, the Middle East, and economic and security studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

James M. DorseyChina and the Middle EastGlobal Political Transitionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64355-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

James M. Dorsey¹

(1)

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

James M. Dorsey

End Abstract

China’s increasingly significant economic and security interests in the greater Middle East, a key global crossroads, impact not only its energy security but also its regional posture, relations with global and regional players, and efforts to pacify nationalist and Islamist Uyghurs in its north-western province of Xinjiang. The threats to those interests are considerably enhanced by its 65-nation, $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative,¹ an ambitious transcontinental, geopolitical ploy to embed Eurasia in a China-centric world buffered by transportation, energy, and trade networks. By comparison, the United States’ Marshall Plan for post-World War II Europe budgeted $800 billion in reconstruction funds to Europe, calculated as a percentage of current gross domestic product (GDP).

Protecting its mushrooming interests is forcing China to review fundamental principles that have long underwritten its foreign and defence policy and realign its policies and relationships in the region. “The time for China’s policy quietly to reap economic benefits with limited risk exposure to the Middle East markets and policies is past; Beijing can no longer steer clear of geopolitical risk,” said China scholar Mordechai Chaziza.²

The Belt and Road initiative, encompassing a geography populated by 4.4 billion people or 63% of the world’s population with an aggregate GDP of $2.1 trillion or 29% of the world’s wealth, serves as an integrator of China’s segmented regional approaches across Eurasia, including its evolving Greater Middle East policy. China’s approach is rooted in the concept of xijin, a march west to balance China’s maritime weakness by expanding its influence in the Greater Middle East that includes Central Asia as well as parts of South Asia.³ One consequence of this is that China has become a regional, if not a global, player, in competitive cooperation with the United States, the dominant external actor in the greater Middle East.

Another is that it is about far more than US-Chinese rivalry during the Cold War which historian Gregg A. Brazinsky concluded was primarily about status rather than ideology even if China’s definition of status, the lack of an ambition to dominate, remains at the core of pronouncements of the People’s Republic. Then like now, Chinese official thinking remains informed by the notion that China deserves a central or elevated position in international affairs. And then like now, China shies away from subverting governments, arguing instead that it can assist them in ways that the United States or the Soviet Union in the past cannot.⁴

Chinese officials do not tire in noting that non-interference means that Chinese aid and investment does not come with intrusive conditions attached like the demand to adhere to human rights, pursue economic liberalization, and adopt good governance. Yet in fact, China insists that its partners commit to its One China policy, limit relations with Taiwan, cooperate in countering Uyghur nationalists and jihadists, keep silent about Tibet, at times support China’s position in the United Nations Security Council, and give Chinese companies priority in China-funded projects. Tajik economist Safovudin Jaborov argued that Chinese funding amounted to “predatory lending … that seeks to promote (China’s) own political and economic interests more than to work in the best interest of borrowers.”⁵

Adherence to Chinese policies can nonetheless pay off handsomely in financial terms even if it limits economic growth and domestic job creation and potentially involves transfer of ownership of resources. A cable from the US embassy in Dushanbe quoted Jamshed Rahmonberdiev, the CEO of Somon Capital Investment Bank, as saying that “China’s investments in Tajikistan clearly serve a political purpose as much as, if not more than, an economic purpose. No one in either the Chinese or Tajik governments is speaking about paying back Chinese loans. … Tajik leaders appear to believe they will deal with loan repayments on the basis of the ‘friendship between countries policy’ by supporting the Chinese politically, for instance on their treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang or on Taiwan.”⁶

Kyrgyz public policy scholar Kemel Toktomushev warned that Chinese aid policy and investment funding guidelines undermined national governments’ efforts to advance good governance and curb corruption by providing “a new source of rent for … ruling elites … Chinese modes of foreign investment do not often comply with the normative expectations of responsible development, instead exacerbating the problems of political accountability and economic governance,” Toktomushev said.⁷

The Belt and Road, rooted in the country’s post-1949 periphery and good neighbour policy approach, nevertheless “places China on par with the United States as a great power that is capable of providing leadership to the international system. … (The Belt and Road) and its associated components, such as the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund, portray China as a provider rather than free-rider of international public goods,” according to China expert Michael Clark.⁸ The notion of parity has gained currency with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s promotion of a “new type of great power relationship,” a G2 world in which the United States and China would act as the dominant powers.

The notion is reinforced with China taking stock of the Middle East and North Africa’s volatility and tumultuous, often violent conflicts and political transitions. It feels the pressure to acknowledge that it no longer can maintain distance to the Middle East and North Africa’s multiple disputes as it successfully did in recent decades. Despite official denials, China is realizing that, like other major powers, it ultimately will be sucked into the vortex of Middle Eastern and South Asian rivalries, conflicts, and politics. Its long-standing official adherence to the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of others that dates back to the era of Mao Zedong and traces its roots to a policy enshrined in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, its refusal to envision a foreign military presence, and its insistence that its primary focus is the development of mutually beneficial “win-win” economic and commercial relations increasingly fall short of what it needs to do to safeguard its vital interests. China’s balancing act is moreover increasingly compromised by its effort to be a friend to all, an undertaking that becomes more and more difficult as the greater Middle East is enveloped by transitions that started in 2011 with the popular Arab revolts and are likely to play out over a period of up to half a century. To maintain its precarious tightrope walk to the degree possible, China continued to pay lip service to principles it increasingly has had to relegate to the garbage bin of history in response to developments on the ground.

China’s balancing act is one reason why it has yet to articulate a grand strategy. Instead, China has over the years released a series of papers that address aspects of defence and other policies as well as approaches to various parts of the world but no overarching document that ties the parts together. The policies are nonetheless hotly debated among scholars and pundits. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Wang Jisi, the dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, insisted in 2011 that China needs to formulate a strategy that defines its core interests, the external threats to those interests, and how China intends to protect them.⁹ His article picked up on a revival of discussions that were being waged already for several years and built on debates dating back to the 1970s when Deng Xiaoping began to open China up and advocated that China maintain a low profile in international affairs in a bid to minimize opposition to the country’s rise.¹⁰

Some analysts, including Shi Yinhong, the head of the Center for American Studies at Renmin University, fear that China’s reluctance to formulate an overall strategy increases rather than reduces its risks as it becomes more active and is increasingly drawn into crises and disputes. “The problem is … if the focal points of Chinese diplomatic policies are too scattered, or if Beijing fails to calculate the possible risks in the Belt and Road initiative and the negative global response toward China’s increasing military power, we might not be able to make use of the opportunities brought by the decline and disorganization in the West,” Yinhong said. A critic of the Belt and Road and the creation of parallel multilateral institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Yinhong argued that before embarking on a massive, transformative geopolitical project, China should “first develop our own strength and capability.”¹¹

That may be a luxury China can no longer afford. Geopolitical change across Eurasia, including the demise of the Soviet Union, the emergence of independent Muslim nations in Central Asia, the war in Afghanistan, and the influence of Saudi-inspired Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism in Pakistan and across the Muslim world, has significantly raised the stakes. That is nowhere truer than in the troubled north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang, home to the Uyghurs, a restive Turkic population. Massive geopolitical change in Muslim Eurasia has deprived Xinjiang of the protective buffer that long shielded it from the fallout of conflict in the greater Middle East. “Trends governing the situation in the Middle East and the region’s pan-nationalisms and extremist religious ideological trends have a direct influence on China’s security and stability,” said Li Weijian, a Middle East and Africa scholar at the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies.¹²

The pressure to revisit long-standing foreign and defence policy principles is further driven by the fact that China’s key interests in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Towards a New World Order
• 3. The United States and China: Seeking Complementary Approaches
• 4. Avoiding the Pitfalls of Diverging Interests
• 5. Navigating Regional Rivalries and Sensitivities
• 6. Pakistan: The Belt and Road’s Soft Underbelly
• 7. Long Live the Autocrat and Neo-Colonialism
• 8. The Middle East: Testing the Boundaries of Non-interference
• 9. Epilogue
• Back Matter