Sri Lanka’s major creditors, including India, Japan, and France, are nearing a debt deal by mid-October, according to the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shinbun. However, there are serious questions as to whether China (one of Sri Lanka’s largest bilateral creditors) will be part of the deal.
This puts much pressure on Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s upcoming visit to Beijing to attend ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative. Wickremesinghe ...
Category: China-Middle East
Q&A: Lots of Smiles, Lots of Handshakes, But What Else Did Syrian President Bashar Assad Get During His Recent Visit to China?
President Bashar al-Assad's visit to China in late September is widely seen as an important step in Syria's re-integration into the international community after years of Western-led international isolation. Assad received a much warmer welcome in China than he would pretty ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
Glimmers of Debt Deal for Sri Lanka Raises China Pressure
The China-Mediterranean Observer: Amid a Surge of Palestinian-Israeli Violence, Chinese Optimism About Its Role in the Peace Process Fades
June was a relatively uneventful month for Chinese commentators and journalists covering developments in Sino-Mediterranean relations. Among the few events that garnered significant media attention was the state visit by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Beijing. In line with the ...
Netanyahu May be Going to China to Boost His Political Standing at Home, Says Israeli Scholar
The political calculations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made in agreeing to accept President Xi Jinping's invitation to visit may be far more nuanced than the prevailing narratives in the Israeli and U.S. media, which largely frame it around annoying Joe Biden.
Chinese Scholars Are (Really) Confident China Can Mediate a Settlement Between Palestinians and Israelis
There is an emerging consensus among prominent Mideast scholars in China that Beijing is now the ideal mediator to help broker a settlement to the seemingly intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Their confidence (which some might see as hubris) is rooted in the ...
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Arrives in Beijing
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, arrived in Beijing for a four-day visit that will see meetings with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang. The trip (Abbas’s first visit to Beijing since 2017) is being framed as an attempt to ...
Q&A: What is Mahmoud Abbas Trying to Achieve in Beijing?
We asked Jony Essa, The China-Global South Project’s Mideast editor, to unpack the significance of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s visit to China: What message is this visit sending? Abbas is sending a message to the ...
China Ready for Israel-Palestine Mediation: Foreign Minister
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Monday spoke by phone to both his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts. This has strengthened impressions that Beijing could be considering a mediator role in one of the Middle East’s most intractable conflicts in the aftermath of its success in de-escalating similarly long-running ...
China Tries to Maintain Mideast Diplomatic Momentum With Summit Planned for Later This Year
China will host a summit between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council later this year, reports the Wall Street Journal. The summit with the six-country bloc (made up of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait) will further solidify the normalization of diplomatic ...
State Department Spox: U.S. Not Being Supplanted by China in Mideast as “Some Allege”
The U.S. State Department dismissed suggestions that China’s brokering of a diplomatic thaw between Iran and Saudi Arabia reflects a diminishment of the United States’s influence in the Middle East. Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that: “In any way you look at it, America is deeply engaged with the ...
Unpacking Israeli Reactions to Iran-Saudi Deal
As Israel’s famously feisty commentariat lays into the China-brokered Iran-Saudi thaw, the country’s reactions will likely have broader impacts. Israel’s own role in the region’s security landscape is at play, but its close relationship with the United States will also influence how Washington deals with the broader ...
Iran-Saudi Pact Marks China’s Debut as Great Power Diplomatic Player
Friday's news that China brokered the final stage of a diplomatic détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia triggered a torrent of analysis in major news publications around the world. From Asia to the Middle East to the United States, two consistent ...