Xi to Visit Saudi Arabia — China’s Growing Middle East Ties
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Salma Hossein
- . December 7, 2022
- . Update: December 7, 2022 8:52 pm
On Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Saudi Arabia for a flurry of meetings with heads of state from all around the Middle East, an area where old American allies are becoming more and more close to China.
Mr. Xi’s visit aims to strengthen China’s long-standing ties with the Gulf area, which initially began as a narrow effort to acquire oil but have since expanded into a complicated relationship involving arms sales, technological transfers, and infrastructure projects.
According to Gedaliah Afterman, director of the Asia Policy Program at the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy and International Relations at Reichman University in Israel, “when countries in the Gulf think of their future, they see China as their partner.”
The two nations’ mutual economic interests are evident: Saudi Arabia’s top trading partner is China, and Saudi Arabia is one of China’s top oil suppliers. Chinese businesses are heavily involved in the kingdom, undertaking massive construction projects, establishing 5G infrastructure, and creating military drones.
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The two regimes have also come to understand one another as authoritarian powers prepared to ignore one another’s violations of human rights. Both of them recoil at the thought of strangers meddling in their personal matters.
The Chinese leader will participate in summits with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Arab world during the three-day trip, according to the Saudi state news agency on Tuesday. The report added that Saudi Arabia and China would sign a “strategic cooperation” and stated that more than 30 heads of state and executives from international organizations planned to attend.
The trip suggests that Beijing’s influence in the area is expanding at a time when American leaders claim they wish to give the Middle East less attention and concentrate diplomatic and military resources on Asia and Europe.
