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China's Upsurge: Implications for the Middle East

Until the late 1970s, China’s impact on the Middle East was negligible by almost any standard. Although the Chinese regarded the presence of foreign powers in the region as an indirect threat to their national security, there was very little they could have done to uproot such interventions. Excluded from international organizations (primarily the United Nations and its Security Council), and maintaining only a limited network of formal diplomatic relations with the region’s governments, Beijing was unable to exert any significant political influence in the Middle East. This failure derived not only from China’s political and strategic marginalization in the world but also from its relative military and economic backwardness. There was practically no way that China could have effectively competed with the Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, let alone with the Western bloc, led by the US, in providing military and civilian goods to the Middle East. Crippled in diplomatic, economic and military terms, Mao’s China had no option but to cultivate nongovernmental unofficial actors, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, by backing a number of Middle Eastern national liberation and revolutionary movements. Despite its offers of ideological, doctrinal and limited material support, China was mostly an outsider in the Middle East, playing only a marginal role. Since the late 1970s, however, many if not most of these parameters have changed, some dramatically so. Obviously less concerned about revolution and ideology, the People’s Republic of China (hereafter, PRC)— now a permanent member of the UN Security Council—has managed to establish full diplomatic relations with all Middle Eastern governments without exception. Furthermore, over the last twenty-five years China’s economy has been growing at an incredible average annual rate of 9.5 percent, becoming one of the strongest in the world. Also, although officially downgraded to the fourth priority among the PRC’s Four Modernizations, China’s defence reforms have gathered momentum over