It’s been two weeks since Arab leaders gathered in Beijing for the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum and analysts who closely follow Chinese foreign policy in the Mideast have had a chance to digest the outcomes of this year’s gathering.
Jonathan Fulton, a renowned China-Persian Gulf scholar at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, conducted an informal survey of academics and policy analysts who specialize in China-Mideast relations to gauge their response to the forum and what’s ahead for China, particularly related to the Israel/Palestinian crisis.
Everyone surveyed by Fulton for this story published in his China-MENA Newsletter was anonymous:
- DID PEOPLE IN THE REGION FOLLOW THE FORUM? “We are distracted strategically, and honestly in the strategic community, I haven’t heard people, you know, saying, “Oh, let’s watch the Chinese statement.”
- DID THE JOINT STATEMENT ON PALESTINE SURPRISE YOU? “Not really, to be honest. I think it’s in tune with what the Chinese have signaled and said since the crisis began. And the cost of such joint statements isn’t very high either: globally there are condemnations emerging left and right about Israel’s behavior.”
- IS CHINA SEEN AS AN IMPORTANT ACTOR IN THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE DISPUTE? “When push comes to shove, and when you look at kind of the accumulated experiences we have with China wading into this issue, like the three points, the four points, the five points…etc. nothing substantive has come out of it because it’s just not their mediation style, and they don’t actually have the coercive capacity to reshape Israeli politics, which is the core issue.”
- HAS CHINA’S RESPONSE TO OCTOBER 7TH DONE IRREPARABLE HARM TO CHINA-ISRAEL TIES? “I wouldn’t say irreparable, but I think that right now, we’re at a very, very, very low point. And things are very sensitive right now. It’ll take them a lot of time to go back to the way they were. And we should remember that we were in a decline even before October 7th because of COVID, because of the U.S.-China rivalry. Because of all that, we were in a decline anyway. So now we are even more in a decline. And it’ll take a decade to forget. I don’t think we can forget that.”
