China's Middle East Gambit: A Strategic Play, Not a Sign of Decline

“Their reaction or lack-thereof to Israel-Gaza does not repudiate China’s Middle East ambitions, but rather is a microcosm of its strategy in action.”

From the moment news broke of the utterly horrendous acts perpetrated by Hamas upon Israeli civilians in the country’s western Negev desert, within the West, the conflict has been thrown into broader geopolitical discussions within the West. Some have focused on its impact on regional stability and others on its relationship with the concurrent Russo-Ukrainian war. However, an increasingly popular stance has been to view China’s ambivalence to 7 October as a repudiation of its recent Middle East diplomatic ploy and, thus a defence of Western international pre-eminence.

To take such a stance, as has been promoted across outlets of Western journalism, from The Spectator to Reuters, is not just a dangerously over-optimistic position but is reflective of the strain of thought that has underwritten all of the West’s major strategic failures in recent years. Taking a leaf from the recent history of Western foreign policy should provide a cautionary tale against this swift optimism and underestimation of foreign strategy.

Perhaps no single region stands as a more vivid indictment of Western foreign policy hubris than the Greater Middle East. It was a grave misreading of the tenacity of Afghanistan’s tribal soldiers during the 19th century’s “Great Game” that caused Britain’s retreat from Kabul in 1842 and extinguished the attempt to ward off a Russian threat to its East India Company possessions. The failure to heed these Victorian lessons in regional intervention later paved the way for repeatedly miscalculated Western interventions under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and most infamously Bush the Younger.

Whilst attitudes toward the Middle East have historically been a weak point for Western strategic thinking, nothing could make it more dangerous at the present than a combination with an underestimation of China’s own regional gambit.

China’s Ambitions

Realising its lofty ambition of displacing the US-led “rules-based order” demands that Chinese foreign policy make itself uncompromisingly distinct from the Western approach in the eyes of Middle Eastern leaders. What could be a more obvious point of departure than standing firmly in adherence to non-intervention?

It is thus upon this fundamental tenet that China approaches its relations with the region. Coming to grips with the true meaning of Chinese non-intervention, however, entails shifting our focus beyond a scope ostensibly denoting non-interference in foreign conflicts. From morally blind financial diplomacy to institutional diplomatic abstention, non-intervention has come to encompass a broad strategy that seeks to cultivate an image of neutrality whilst bolstering national security interests.

Where the West has been at the forefront of neo-orientalist criticisms of Middle Eastern regimes, for example, attempts to shape Qatari attitudes toward sexuality, China has remained tight-lipped. So far, this strategy has paid off. Whilst Western inner-city politics may reward the moral condemnation of the Middle East’s domestic policies, it has been received by foreign leaders no less harshly than the attempts to impose neoliberal economic reform or topple unfavourable regimes.

China’s reaction or lack thereof, to 7 October is not an outlier, but an exemplification of their silent complicity in the proliferation of destruction in return for diplomatic and financial power.

Nowhere is the impact of China’s distinction against the interventionist approach clearer than in the recent volte face of Middle East’s trade. Figures from the Carnegie Endowment put this in no uncertain terms; in a period where Chinese trade with the region has shot up from $180bn in 2019 to $259bn in 2021, American trade slipped from $120bn to just $82bn. Preferring non-interventionism, China has seen the country become the number one trading partner with Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Iran, Oman, Egypt, Iraq, and the UAE. Adherence to amoral financial diplomacy has unequivocally powered the country’s “rejuvenation”, as Xi Jinping would classify it, and through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, presents an enticing alternative for much of the developing world.

Military non-intervention walks hand-in-hand with this morally blind financial diplomacy, and its application to the Israel-Hamas conflict is nothing new. Its historic entrenchment within Chinese strategic thinking can be drawn back to the ancient board game Weiqi, which American foreign policy stalwart Henry Kissinger eloquently outlined in his 2013 treatise “On China”. Rather than the total victory of the West’s chess, Weiqi promotes a gradual “strategic encirclement” and a strategic aversion to conflict.

Heralded by China’s foreign policy establishment as a “magic weapon”, non-intervention has long stood at the state’s philosophical core since its inception as a fifth of its “Five Principles for Peaceful Coexistence” in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement. Just a year later, the principle was etched into the bedrock of the Chinese constitution.

A more extreme contemporary manifestation came in 2005, when amidst knowledge of a mounting death toll in Sudan’s western Darfur region, culminating in what is often considered the 21st Century’s first genocide, the Hu Jinato-led Chinese government favoured non-intervention and UNSC abstention, preserving ties with Khartoum. Whilst such an approach has obviously won over much of the developing world from the Western model, non-intervention also provides China with a strong rhetorical defence.

Remaining “neutral” in global conflicts provides a necessary level of immunity against international criticisms of its own foreign and domestic policy shortcomings. ‘If we’re not criticising you, don’t criticise us’ is the order that China is promoting.

What Middle Eastern leaders have thus found in China is all they’ve ever wanted: a willing global partner who will not interfere with their domestic or regional affairs, however dire or wanting these might be. Xi Jinping’s non-intervention in response to the atrocities of 7 October merely seals the deal.

Whilst a first glance at the Chinese response to 7 October may signify clear inaction and paralysis, a failure from the West to accurately grapple with the meaning and success of this strategy in winning over Middle Eastern and African leaders, however amoral an approach it may be, could once again doom Western diplomacy to the trap of underestimation.

At a time of increasing political incompetence and social division across the Western world, with the US narrowly avoiding a debt crisis and experiencing the longest time without a Speaker of the House since the Cold War days of 1962, Australia bitterly divided following an Indigenous referendum, and a fractured British politics, now is not the time for misplaced hubris. If the West has any chance to counter the crystalising influence of Chinese diplomacy, it must also appreciate the power of Chinese non-intervention.

Image courtesy of Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia, ©2021. Some rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.