Last March, it was hard to miss the sense of satisfaction on the face of Wang Yi. Having just brokered a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the former Chinese foreign minister gently nudged his two counterparts together. He stood between them and was in firm control.
Last March, it was hard to miss the sense of satisfaction on the face of Wang Yi. Having just brokered a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the former Chinese foreign minister gently nudged his two counterparts together. He stood between them and was in firm control.
There was every reason for Wang to feel satisfied. China had not only done what many considered impossible, but it was also the only country that possibly could—or so the argument went. The two countries were enemies, but each trusted China. The United States was focused on Middle East security, but China was actually providing it. Wang’s improbable success was yet another sign of China’s rising role in the Middle East.
And yet, for the past four months, the confident Chinese diplomacy of last March has been absent. As the Middle East has slid into violence, there has been no sign of Chinese mediation and little sign of actual Chinese diplomacy—despite more than a half-century of support for Palestinians, more than a decade of close ties with Israel, and tens of billions of dollars of investment in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and beyond.
Even more pointedly, as three months of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping slammed Chinese trade and began to strangle some of China’s regional partners, Beijing often has seemed either unable or unwilling to act—diplomatically, militarily, or economically—to advance its broader interests, let alone those of its partners.
China likes to advertise itself as a rising global power, and it likes to poke the United States for falling short of its global ambitions to secure peace and prosperity. Arab commentators contrasted the warmth surrounding Chinese President Xi Jinping’s December 2022 summit in Riyadh with U.S. President Joe Biden’s more strained meeting with the Saudi leadership in Jeddah five months before. Al-Riyadh newspaper cited “independent Western sources” who claimed that “the region will enter, in the medium term, a phase of moving away from dictates and hegemony and toward a phase of geostrategic balance and political justice through Chinese influence based on development, investment, peoples’ well-being, and distancing from conflicts.”
That is exactly the future that China would like these states to embrace. Not incorrectly, China sees the United States as its principal strategic challenge, and everything else pales in comparison.
What is surprising is just how much this is true. China’s actions—and inaction—over the past four months highlight that despite decades of investment in the Middle East, Beijing’s main regional focus remains undermining the United States. While China has indeed become a regional player in the Middle East, it is still playing a remarkably self-interested game.
The origin of China’s Middle East interest is energy. China first became a net oil importer 30 years ago, and for most of the past two decades, China accounted for almost half the world’s increase in oil demand. Throughout this period, about half of China’s imported oil has come from the Middle East.
For China, reliance on the Middle East has been a persistent vulnerability. The United States has been the dominant security actor in the region for a half-century, and many Chinese fear that, in times of U.S.-China hostility, the United States could cut China off from essential energy supplies. Similarly, the Middle East is host to three shipping chokepoints vital to all global trade: the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Suez Canal. Many Chinese containers bound for Africa, Europe, and even the east coast of the United States pass through all three of them. The U.S. Navy is now poised to protect all of these chokepoints, but it could block them as well.
China’s strategy has been to coexist with the United States rather than to confront it, and to persuade regional countries to grow their Chinese relationships alongside their U.S. ones. Nearly 10 years ago, China declared “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with Algeria and Egypt, later adding Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates to the list. Not coincidentally, Beijing successfully lobbied for the latter four to join the BRICS bloc (then comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) last August—constituting four-fifths of the total expansion. China argues that it seeks to deepen its economic ties throughout the Middle East, boosting trade and development along the way.
Middle Eastern states have welcomed China’s growing regional role. Partly, this is because China liberates them from Western pressures to liberalize, and partly because China gives them an economic partner that prizes speed over exacting regulatory precision. They also see China as a rising global power, and after more than a decade of U.S. presidential declarations that Washington’s principal interests lie in Asia, it would seem reckless for Middle Eastern states to fail to build a robust relationship with China.
The narrative that China has put forward is that countries can develop their China ties alongside their ties to Western states. While true in principle, in practice, this has proven more complicated. Western governments charge that Chinese technological investments in the region aim embed tools for Chinese espionage. As a consequence, Western governments sometimes consider regional governments’ acquisition of that technology as an obstacle to a range of cooperative security arrangements.
Chinese scholars have been deeply critical of U.S. regional security efforts. As a prominent Chinese scholar wrote, “China is a victim of regional instability as a result of the U.S.’ reckless military actions and presence.” A Chinese article reporting on Wang’s January 2022 meeting with the foreign ministers of six Middle Eastern states quoted Wang saying, “We believe the people of the Middle East are the masters of the Middle East. There is never a ‘power vacuum,’ and there is no need of ‘patriarchy from outside.’”
Chinese experts’ common refrain is that the U.S. approach shows insufficient respect to countries in the Middle East. “Being a hegemonic power for too long, the U.S. is accustomed to pressuring others in its own interest while being deaf to their concerns,” one author suggests.
When the Saudi-Iranian deal was struck in March 2023, the Chinese side portrayed it as paving the way “for realizing peace and stability in the Middle East and set a fine example for resolving problems and disagreements between countries through dialogue and consultation,” and promised that “China will continue its constructive role.”
And yet in the months since violence erupted in the Middle East, China has piggybacked on global statements of concern, but it has offered few of its own. Its clearest condemnation was of what was initially thought to be an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City in October, and later determined to be the consequence of errant Palestinian rockets.
It has neither condemned Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, nor condemned Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. There is no Chinese diplomatic proposal to address any element of the unfolding and interrelated crises in the region, other than to announce the general desirability of holding a peace conference. For China, the instruments of diplomacy—high-level visits, incentives and punishments, mediation—have all been held in reserve.
Before a January meeting in Thailand between U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Wang where Red Sea security was on the agenda, Chinese and Iranian officials alike asserted that China had complained to the Iranian government about its support for the Houthis to no avail. Whether such statements were merely intended to insulate Wang from U.S. pressure or reflect China’s real inability to affect the Iranian calculus is unclear.
Meanwhile, Western and Middle Eastern diplomats are deeply engaged with each other to try to find some way to save lives, reduce tensions, and free up global trade.
It is hard to argue that events in the region do not directly harm Chinese interests. One can start with the Houthis. They take in about $100 million per year from Iran, whose trade with China is a third of its worldwide total, but whose trade constitutes less than one percent of China’s trade.
China cares a lot more about the rest of the world than it does about Iran, and according to some accounts, 90 percent of the container ships that normally pass through the southern Red Sea have rerouted to avoid the area. In normal times, Red Sea routes account for about a third of all global container traffic, and 40 percent of all trade between Asia and Europe. The bottleneck in shipping is tripling or quadrupling container prices, pushing energy shipments headed to Europe to circumnavigate Africa and crippling supply chains because of delays on deliveries.
China is not only a trading nation, but also a maritime one. Frictions in global trade both affect China directly and push investors toward “nearshoring”—shifting supply chain reliance to closer, friendlier nations—to avoid future disruptions.
The disruptions also hurt Chinese investments in the Middle East. China has poured tens of billions of dollars into Red Sea facilities—not only into its own military base in Djibouti, but into port facilities, railways, factories, and myriad other projects in East Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, partly financed through its widely touted Belt and Road Initiative. All of those projects are endangered by a breakdown in Red Sea shipping.
Throughout the Middle East, Iranian proxies threaten to tip the region toward war, and they do so partly through their attacks on Israel, which itself has been steadily growing its own China ties for almost two decades. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker, China has invested almost $9 billion in Israel over the past 10 years and built $3 billion worth of projects.
While few expect China to control Iran, let alone its proxies, it is notable that China does not even seem to be trying. But in this crisis, China also sees opportunity.
China has done two things to leverage the crisis. The first is criticize the United States, seeking to galvanize hostility in the global south to the U.S. role in the Middle East. A China Daily column argued in October that the United States was with the “wrong side of history” in Gaza, and “it should fulfill its global responsibility as the world’s sole superpower by helping avoid a bigger humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.” Chinese outlets have continued to take pot shots at U.S. diplomatic efforts in ways that fan both anti-U.S. and anti-Israel sentiment in the global south, arguing—sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly—that U.S. bias toward Israel is blocking pursuit of a two-state solution that would fundamentally resolve the underlying conflict.
The second thing that China is doing is taking care of its immediate economic interests. There is increased demand for Chinese vessels, which shippers believe the Houthis will not attack. Some ships sailing through the Red Sea are broadcasting that they have “all Chinese crew” on ship tracking devices to avoid attacks.
China is demonstrating in the Middle East that its diplomacy strains to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. It is further exhibiting an aversion to doing hard things that serve common benefit. Instead, Chinese officials are hunkering down and looking for marginal ways to advance their own interests at the expense of partners and allies.
That is not the sort of “win-win” logic that China often touts as its calling card. Now, China is sitting on the sidelines while everyone loses, including China.
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