You might call it the third edition of China's Mideast policy. Over the past half-year, the Chinese government has dramatically reconfigured its approach to the Middle East, abandoning long-held principles like non-interference and strategic balancing in favor of a policy that has made it an increasingly partisan player in the unfolding geopolitics of the region.
It wasn't always this way. Historically, Beijing has calibrated its Mideast policy carefully, seeking to extract maximum benefit from its limited engagement, first in economic and then in strategic terms. Today, however, a significant shift in thinking toward the region appears to have taken place in the PRC. It is one with sweeping implications for China's traditional regional partners — and its new ones.
ENERGY AND ARMS
The first iteration of China's approach to the region, which predominated during the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras (1989-2002 and 2002-2012, respectively), was decidedly mercantile in nature. Writing in Middle East Quarterly back in 2005, Jin Liangxiang of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies mapped out the "energy first" approach that characterized Beijing's attitude toward the region for much of the 1990s and 2000s. That policy, Jin explained, focused overwhelmingly on securing stable sources of oil and natural gas to fuel the PRC's ballooning economy.[1]
The results were a deepening Chinese stake in the region's energy-rich states, and ballooning Chinese oil imports from the Persian Gulf. "While the Middle East accounted for less than 40 percent of China's oil imports before 1994," Jin outlined, "since 1996, the proportion has risen to over half." What this meant, in practical terms, was a deepening Chinese dependence on suppliers like Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen.[2]
A second, albeit notable, facet of this mercantile outreach was the sale of arms to the region. Leveraging the desires of weapons-hungry regional states, Chinese arms exports to the region surged in the 1990s and 2000s, as the PRC sold, among other things, battlefield materiel to the Islamic Republic of Iran and missiles to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.[3]
On the whole, however, Chinese engagement in the Middle East — though growing — could still be said to be modest. It wouldn't remain that way for long.
EXPANDED PRIORITIES UNDER XI
The ascent to power of Xi Jinping a little over a decade ago marked the start of a second, qualitatively new phase of Chinese Mideast engagement. On the back of Xi's signature foreign policy project, the Belt & Road Initiative, China broadened its involvement in the region through new trade deals, investment ventures and infrastructure projects. This approach was typified by triangulation, with China simultaneously seeking to engage the Sunni Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Shi'ite Iran and the Jewish state of Israel.
This turned out to be a shrewd calculation—and one that reaped enormous dividends for the PRC. It established China as a major stakeholder in Israel's vibrant high-tech sector.[4] Beijing likewise assumed a key role in the Saudi government's expansive "Vision 2030" strategy.[5] And in 2021, China's government inked a sweeping quarter-century deal with Iran—then struggling financially as a result of the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" policy—giving it extensive access to various sectors of the Iranian economy and positioning the two countries for deeper military coordination.[6]
In this way, China's leaders succeeded in establishing a significant — and growing — geopolitical footprint in one of the world's most vital regions. Moreover, that positioning has become increasingly vital in recent years against the backdrop of souring diplomatic ties and deepening strategic competition with the United States.
THE NEW "NEW NORMAL"
But everything changed on October 7th. The brutal campaign of terror carried out against communities in southern Israel by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas that day resulted in the single largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. It also propelled Israel into a new war in the Gaza Strip — one intended to end Hamas' rule there and to secure the return of Israeli hostages.
Yet while the grisly terror campaign evoked sympathy for Israel among many nations, China was not among them. Officials in Beijing conspicuously refrained from expressing their solidarity with the Jewish state, instead calling almost immediately for greater inter-national action on the "Palestinian question."[7] China, moreover, was quick to condemn Israel's subsequent military operations in the Gaza Strip, and has emerged as a consistent, vociferous opponent of the Israeli government even as it has sought to engage various Palestinian factions and improve their bargaining power.[8] As my colleague Joshua Eisenman has noted, China's previous foreign policy line — that relations between Beijing and Jerusalem are "stronger than ever" despite American pressure of recent years — has experienced a complete reversal in an astonishingly short amount of time.[9]
China's policy preferences, meanwhile, are being amplified by social media and turbo-charged by information technology. On platforms like Tiktok, which boasts a staggering 170 million users in the U.S. alone, the post-10/7 era has witnessed an explosion of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic content which far exceeds normal or even predictable proportions.[10] This state of affairs has been corroborated by Jewish content creators, who have experienced an unprecedented "avalanche of hate" on the platform in recent months.[11]
Why should this matter? After all, anti-Semitism can be found on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) as well. But Tiktok isn't simply another social media app. As numerous scholars and national security practitioners have noted, the social media platform serves as a "trojan horse" of sorts for the Chinese Communist Party, which—via its hold over parent company ByteDance, which is domiciled in the PRC—has the ability to use it to access, and influence, the views of literally hundreds of millions of people. And the overwhelming evidence suggests that, in tandem with the shift that has taken place in its Mideast policy, Beijing is now putting its finger on the scale of online debate concerning the region. Or, as Josh Rogin of the Washington Post has bluntly put it: "fueling online antisemitism is China's new tool against the West."[12]
In other words, it is difficult to divorce the revamped way in which Beijing is approaching the Middle East from the unfolding "great power competition" between China and the United States. China's changing engagement reflects an understanding that U.S. Mideast policy of recent years has created a critical opening—and that the current Israel-Hamas war has now afforded it an opportunity to ingratiate itself with an increasingly inflamed "Arab street."
This shift, of course, is not cost-free for China. Perhaps belatedly, Israeli scholars and experts have started waking up to the reality that, for all of the initial benefits that they believed stronger ties with China would confer to their country, the PRC is not in fact a dependable partner.[13] As they do, ties between China and the Jewish state can be expected to decline in both scope and vibrance. However, given the potential dividends of stronger ties with the Arab states, as well as with Iran, that seems to be a price that Beijing is more than willing to pay.
Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.
ENDNOTES
[1] Jin Liangsheng, "Energy First: China and the Middle East," Middle East Quarterly 12, no. [2] Spring 2005, https://www.meforum.org/694/energy-first.
2. Ibid.
[3] Dan Blumenthal, "Providing Arms: China and the Middle East," Middle East Quarterly 12, no. 2, Spring 2005, https://www.meforum.org/695/providing-arms.
[4] See, for instance, Alan D. Abbey, "Chinese firms invest heavily in Israel – and are eager to do more," Jerusalem Post, September 1, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/all-news/article-757044.
[5] See, for instance, Shogo Akagawa and Shuntaro Fukutomi, "Saudi Arabia to keep bolstering ties with China: economic chief," Nikkei Asia, January 18, 2024, https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/Saudi-Arabia-to-keep-bolstering-ties-with-China-economic-chief.
[6] See, for instance, Farnaz Fassihi and Steven Lee Myers, "China, With $400 Billion Iran Deal, Could Deepen Influence in Mideast," New York Times, March 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/world/middleeast/china-iran-deal.html.
[7] Grant Rumley and Rebecca Redlich, "Tracking Chinese Statements on the Hamas-Israel Conflict," Washington Institute for Near East Policy Policy Analysis, November 3, 2023, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/tracking-chinese-statements-hamas-israel-conflict.
[8] "Rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas meet in China," Al-Jazeera, April 30, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/30/china-says-palestinian-rivals-hamas-and-fatah-met-for-talks-in-beijing.
[9] As cited in Anne Applebaum, "The New Propaganda War," The Atlantic, June 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/.
[10] See, for instance, Zina Rakhmilova, "Tiktok's dangerous antisemitism problem," Jerusalem Post, March 28, 2024, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-794073.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Josh Rogin, "Fueling online antisemitism is China's new tool against the West," Washington Post, January 8, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/08/china-antisemitism-online-tool-west-gaza/.
[13] See, for instance, Simone Lipkind, "Fickle Friends: Sino-Israeli Ties Buckle Amid War With Hamas," Asia Unbound, January 25, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/blog/fickle-friends-sino-israeli-ties-buckle-amid-war-hamas.