Category: MENA

China is steadily reducing its dependence on African oil suppliers who once accounted for a third of Chinese crude imports. Today, China buys more oil from Saudia Arabia than any other country in the world. From 2019 to 2020,

The Moroccan government announced that it plans to embark on a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign that will initially use Chinese-made vaccines even before they've completed advanced trials. King Mohammed VI instructed the government to make the vaccine free, according to a ...

China's presence in the Middle East North Africa region has been steadily rising over the past 25 years and is now entering a new, more complex phase that extends beyond commercial ties to also include potential security implications, writes Afshin Molavi, a senior fellow at ...

Turkey, Iran, and Israel were the protagonists in Chinese commentaries on the wider Mediterranean region. As always, Chinese analysts remain rather pessimistic in their assessment of the situation as they look at the region characterized by a lack of unity among both Arabs and Europeans. Interestingly, the ...

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper made his first official visit to Africa last week, visiting four countries in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, Secretary Esper spoke at every opportunity about the risks posed by growing Chinese and Russian influence on the continent. ...

A new survey published by Arab Barometer, a Princeton University-affiliated non-partisan quantitative research institute, reveals increasingly favorable public perceptions of China in many countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. "In nine of 12 countries surveyed as part of the ...

The European think tank network EuroMeSCo (the Euro-Mediterranean Study Commission) published one of the year's most extensive analyses of China's growing influence throughout the Middle East and North African regions with extensions into the Persian Gulf. The 109-page report ...

Chinese scholars are closely monitoring the deteriorating situation in Libya with an eye on whether instability there will spread to other countries in North Africa, particularly Algeria and Sudan. Sun Xia from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences wondered whether the twin forces of declining oil prices ...

In this issue of the ChinaMed Observer, we cannot but pay great attention to how the discussion on the yet-to-be-finalized agreement between China and Iran has evolved in the Iranian media. Other important issues that we found in the media published in the wider Mediterranean region include ...

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi met on Monday with his counterparts from North Africa, the Mideast, and the Gulf for a surprisingly low-key online ministerial conference. The 9th ministerial meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum, comparable to the Forum on China Africa Cooperation, was co-hosted by Jordanian ...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi kicked off his annual tour of Africa in Cairo this week where he met with senior Egyptian leaders to discuss the growing instability in North Africa, the Mideast, and the Persian Gulf.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrapped up the first stop of his five-nation African tour following a full day of high-level meetings with Egyptian and Arab regional leaders. Security issues in Libya and the situation in Iran were key items on the agenda at several of the ...