China’s rapidly expanding presence in the Middle East has sparked a mix of anxiety and excitement, depending on one’s perspective. Washington regards Beijing’s support of Iran and the Palestinian cause, among other things, as key threats to its strategic interests. While Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and other regional actors see Beijing as a valuable economic partner.
A new book by two leading China-Mideast scholars, Mohamed Alsudairi at the Australian National University and Andrea Ghiselli from the University of Exeter, explores the future of Chinese engagement in the region by laying out three possible scenarios
🔹 Scenario 1: Continuity — China stays focused on trade and investment, without major security commitments.
🔹 Scenario 2: Expansion — Beijing and regional elites push for a deeper Chinese role in governance and security.
🔹 Scenario 3: Discord — mismatched expectations fuel uncertainty and instability.
Mohammed and Andrea join Eric to discuss their new book and which of the three forecasts they think is most likely to happen.
SHOW NOTES:
- Download a FREE copy of the book “Narratives of Sino-Middle Eastern Futures” by Mohammed Alsudairi and Andrea Ghiselli
- Follow the ChinaMed Project for complete coverage of Chinese engagement in the Mediterranean and Middle East regions: https://chinamed.substack.com/
- Subscribe to Andrea Ghiselli’s Substack newsletter on China-Mideast relations: https://substack.com/@andreaghiselli
ABOUT MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI AND ANDREA GHISELLI:
Mohammed Alsudairi is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of the Arabic Speaking World. He holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), an MA in International Relations and International History from the London School of Economics and Peking University, and a BSc in International Politics from Georgetown University. Prior to his appointment at CAIS, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at HKU, working on a project examining the intersections between religion and infrastructure in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Since 2015, he oversaw the development of the Asian Studies Program at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. More recently in 2022, he was awarded a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work on his upcoming book manuscript.
Andrea Ghiselli is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter. Before going to the UK, Andrea spent ten years at Fudan University in Shanghai where he was an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs. He is also the Head of Research of the TOChina Hub’s ChinaMed Project. His book Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. More information about his research can be found at https://andreaghiselli.com/.
TRANSCRIPT:
ERIC OLANDER: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to go back to the Middle East.
It’s a topic we’ve been covering a lot over the past year, just because there has really been so much going on. And one of the things that we’ve been doing on this show is taking the day-by-day play of what’s been happening, particularly in our newsletter coverage, but also on the podcast. We’ve had probably more guests on the Middle East this year than any other region in the world.
But what we’d like to do today is step back from the day-to-day and look at the bigger narratives and try to understand where Chinese engagement in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf is going. Let’s be a little more forward-looking. While I just said I want to step back from the day-to-day, I also want to bring you up to date on some of the latest that’s going on.
And that will help to talk about our discussion in terms of trends, these latest news items. First, this week was a pretty important week in terms of China-Saudi relations. There was a very high-profile delegation from Saudi Arabia led by Investment Minister Khalid Alfali, who is the Investment Minister, and he led this delegation to try and drum up new trade between Saudi Arabia and China.
Now, this is important because Saudi Arabia is trying to reduce its dependence on oil and trying to diversify its economy. China is a major partner in that. Let me just give you a picture of what Saudi-China trade looks like right now.
It’s basically, China sold $50 billion worth of goods to Saudi Arabia last year, and the Saudis exported about $57 billion back to China. Now, 80% of that $57 billion is in the form of oil, and that’s something that the Saudis themselves would like to reduce because they want to develop into technology and new energy and manufacturing and IT and AI. We saw that as a key theme during U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the kingdom as well. And the Chinese are more than happy to provide lots of EVs, new energy, all sorts of technologies, AI servers, AI data centers. And so that’s the basis of those talks between Wang and Khalid Alfali. The other story that’s been going on over in Iran is discussions about the nuclear talks known as the JCPOA.
And there’s talks been going on between Tehran and China and also Russia in trying to prevent sanctions from kicking in at the end of the month. And the Iranians are really trying to make sure that these, what they’re calling snapback sanctions, don’t kick in at the end of August. And then I think that then if the deadline isn’t met then, then full sanctions go in in October.
It’s quite complicated, but right now the Chinese are very much supporting the Iranians. They’ve been quite outspoken. But at the same time, the Chinese are now facing more pressure from the United States on oil shipments from Iran to China.
The U.S. Treasury Department over the past week has sanctioned 13 entities from China, Hong Kong, and the UAE as part of a bigger campaign to try and slow Iranian oil sales to China. China consumes about 90 percent of Iran’s oil. It accounts for about 14 percent of China’s total oil imports.
So it is pretty sizable overall. And the Americans seem to think that if they can squeeze the Iranians on oil, that will force them to the table on other issues. One last point to bring up before we get into our conversation about narratives, and this is a very important one, is that Chinese diplomats at the United Nations and in Beijing spoke out forcefully over the past week expressing their shock, that was their word, about Israeli airstrikes on the Nasser hospital in Gaza that killed 20 people.
The fact that the Chinese spoke out on this issue shouldn’t come as a surprise because the Chinese have been quite consistent in their protest against the Israeli actions in Gaza and in support of Palestinian statehood, but that was something that came on the radar this past week. Let’s try and now bundle all of these stories that I just talked about and put them together into a salad bowl. We’ll mix them up and then try and see what comes out of it in terms of the narratives.
What does this tell us where Chinese engagement in the region is going? And there’s a fascinating new book that came out, very important new book because it’s both free and short, so it’s easy to read, Narratives of Sino-Middle Eastern Futures, written by two old friends of ours on the show, Mohamed Alsudairi, who’s a lecturer at the Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies at Australian National University in Canberra, and our old friend Andrea Ghiselli, who is a lecturer at the University of Exeter in the UK and also head of research at the ChinaMed Project. Good afternoon to both of you, Andrea, Mohamed, thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the book.
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: Thank you for having us.
ANDREA GHISELLI: Yeah, thank you for the invitation.
ERIC OLANDER: Always good to be here. Yeah, always great to speak with you both. I’d like to kind of do some scene setting before we get started.
You look at a period of time, if I’m correct, between 2010 and 2023, is that correct? That’s the range I think you were looking at. And tell us a little bit about how you went about conducting these narrative framings.
So you look at a specific time period and Mohamed, you also talked to a certain group of people, a lot of foreign policy elites and whatnot. Let us understand before we get into the specifics of the narratives that you’re discussing and analyzing and the future that you’re projecting in terms of different scenarios, how did you get there? What were the mechanics of the study?
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: Yeah, well, I mean, again, to just reiterate, thanks for your invitation. And we’re very glad to kind of maybe share a bit about the book and kind of the thought that went into it. Now, regarding your question, the reason why we chose that kind of temporal period was because it was kind of a period that was significant along two scales.
The first was, this was a period, and you could argue that it’s still continuing, that has been marked by a continued debate about America’s relationship to the Middle East. It’s one that is defined by a lot of these discussions, particularly in Washington, but also in regional capitals, of an ongoing American withdrawal and pivot towards Asia. Even though recent events seem to suggest that the United States has not been able to figure out how to do that pivot at all.
So that’s kind of one element that shaped our choice of that temporal frame. And the other, which is also quite closely connected, is that the 2010s was really a period marked by the Arab Spring, considerable regional upheaval, and a lot of energy being focused and channeled by local elites towards thinking about the regional security order and what needs to be done to kind of re-stabilize it after the implosion of multiple states and kind of the upending of the existence balance of power, right, and the rise of other kind of regional actors and their involvement in Arab states. So that was kind of part of the logic that informed our choice of this period.
And we thought it was kind of fruitful to map out kind of the mental landscape of certain elites. Now, of course, because the book was short, it’s part of the Elements series in Cambridge, we couldn’t look at other case studies, but we selected two from the region in conjunction with China. And these two were Saudi Arabia and Syria.
And of course, the reason why we selected these two was because they kind of constituted diametrical extremes or opposite extremes in the regional context where they aligned themselves differently vis-a-vis the United States. Saudi Arabia has an old strategic relationship with the United States going back to the 1940s. Syria, at least up to the overthrow of the Assad regime, positioned itself in a hostile camp to the United States.
So they represented kind of very different actors along the ideological spectrum in relation to the U.S. and how they envisioned the regional order. And along a different scale, they were also states that had markedly different capabilities. Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest economies in the region, 1.3 trillion, highly developed, while Syria, even up to this moment, is a devastated state in society that had really been hollowed out by a 14-year civil war. So the calculations and relationalities are quite different. And what we wanted to do was to kind of look at how these local elites, as well as Chinese elites, think about the regional order and China’s place within it. And in doing so, that might give us a sense of how they think about the future and where things might be headed, because we kind of get a sense of their worldviews as a whole.
I don’t know if you have other things to add to that, Andrea. Oh, sorry.
ERIC OLANDER: Andrea, let me just dive in here in terms of what Mohamed was saying in terms of splitting up between Syria and Saudi Arabia. Now, again, we have to be very clear, this is Assad pre-overthrow, so it’s very different than what’s happened in the past couple of years. But let’s start with what you found in your research on Syria, and then, Mohamed, I’ll come back to you about the question.
Andrea, first, let’s talk about your key findings on Syria.
ANDREA GHISELLI: Yeah, well, on Syria, it builds on our previous research that Mohamed and I have done in the past. So in a way, for us, was the more, maybe the scenario we’re most familiar with. And of course, Mohamed, being from Saudi, knew the Saudi part, and the China met, we do a lot of research on China.
So anyway, so I think the Saudi and the Chinese part were a bit more exciting. But on the Syria side, I think it was quite interesting, because essentially, we found this sector in the region that essentially spoke very loud. It tried to make narratives in which the Chinese were very close, not allies, which if I remember correctly, Mohamed is something that highlights in the chapter, they’re considered as close partners.
They’re not at the same level like the Iranians or the Russians, for example, but they are seen as a very important supporter. In a way, I think, in a way showing like, giving an idea of China, it is about to do two things. One is to take over the US at the global and the regional level, and to play a significant role in the Syrian reconstruction.
Of course, we’re talking again, as in Syria, so there was this idea of a reconstruction after the victory by the regime. So in a way, it seems they overpromised in the words Syrian elites in what depicted a China that didn’t really exist in a way, especially when, and we showed those in the chapter, once you compare what Syrians, you know, and Assadist Syrian elite said about China, and actually what China did, right? If you look at, for example, if you look at the figures that we made, but in the book, and you compare those in the Saudi chapter, for example, and those in the Syria one, just look at the scale, they’re completely different.
For Syria, everything is very close to zero, despite this grand narrative of China being a very close partner.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah, it’s interesting, because one of Assad’s last overseas visits that he made before his overthrow was in September 23 to China. And then of course, he was overthrown the following year. And during that visit, there was a lot of expectation among Syrians that the Chinese were going to come in, they were going to rebuild, there was hope that they were going to be maybe a belt and road partner, or they were going to, you know, get the benefits that China oftentimes is credited with bringing countries like Syria, but nothing really came of it.
And so I guess, did you include that visit on, it was right on the outer rim of your time frame, did you include that visit and the buzz around that visit in your discussions?
ANDREA GHISELLI: We didn’t manage to include it, especially because the focus was really on what the Syrians say in the first place. But I think it’s interesting, since we have the opportunity now to add a bit on that. I think honestly, that’s not completely, I mean, looking back, it’s easy, of course, to speak an insight.
But in a way, I think the invitation of Assad to come to China, in a way, was more a victory lap for Chinese policymakers than for Assad. The Chinese were really sure that they adopted the wrong strategy, they backed on the right horse. And now they invited him, especially as Syria was going back into the fold of the Arab League.
So I don’t think they never had really any interest or intention to really do more than what they were already doing, which was arguably very little. But it was really to show we were right, now we can welcome back, no, Assad is not a prior anymore. And so of course, there was an idea of providing some diplomatic support, but this was very much consistent with what the Chinese have been doing until then, in any case.
ERIC OLANDER: Okay, so Mohamed, a very different situation in Saudi Arabia, as Andrea pointed out, that lots of talk, very little action in Syria, but a very different situation in Saudi Arabia, where there’s both a lot of talk and a lot of action. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest recipients of Belt and Road engagement, it’s also a major destination for Chinese investment, obviously, the second largest oil supplier to China behind the Russians. Tell us about what you found in that period of 2010 to 2023 in terms of elite perceptions of China.
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: Yeah, if I could also add something on Syria, if that’s okay.
ERIC OLANDER: Sure.
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: So I think also one of the other findings that we wanted to kind of underscore, and this is also true with regards to the Saudi case, is that even though the Chinese put a lot of, or sorry, the Syrians put a lot of hope in a Chinese role in reconstruction, which they increasingly became disillusioned with as they came to realize the challenges and the fact that there is really no actual Chinese footprint in terms of investment and participation and reconstruction, is that they never actually talked about China as embedding itself in the regional security architecture. I mean, their conception of China is that it’s an ascending power that will contribute to multipolarization on a global stage, and that this will undermine or reduce American influence, which is seen to be kind of the main actor that is causing turbulence in the region, imposing kind of a cordon or a siege on the regime. So it’s very interesting how, despite all of this positive language about China, what is notably absent is actually a discussion of China coming in as kind of a player akin to that of the United States.
This is completely absent. And this is something that is also noticeable in the Saudi case. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about economic engagement with China, and it’s certainly true.
I mean, aside from the UAE, Saudi Arabia is one of China’s largest trading partners in the region. It attracts increasingly significant amounts of Chinese investment. I think the Saudis had announced last week that cumulatively over 8 billion U.S. dollars had been invested in the country, which is small in comparison to what you see in the UAE. But nevertheless, there is an accelerating trend. And there’s also considerable cooperation technologically and, of course, culturally. I mean, this year is the Saudi-Chinese cultural year, where they’re investing considerable efforts to dispersing grants for researchers.
They’re supporting language acquisition programs, etc. So there’s a lot of momentum, very real ones, in contrast to Syria. But what is interesting is that in terms of the discussions among Saudi elites—and here maybe we can take a step back and think about what they were kind of contending with in the 2010s—is that when Saudi elites were looking at the region, they were looking at a region that was convulsing and where state authority was collapsing all around them.
In Yemen, Iraq was still going out of the throes of the civil war. Syria had collapsed. Egypt was on the precipice.
So everywhere they looked, there was considerable upheaval, as well as in Bahrain, which necessitated the Saudi intervention. And this was combined with two other problems. One was domestic.
So prior to the ascension of King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, there was a sense that the Saudi political economy was unsustainable, that the government had a trophied, and that there was a need for considerable renewal, that in fact the state was really facing existential questions. And on another level, there was also a crisis in terms of Saudi-U.S. relations, which I would argue, in fact, is a crisis that still continues today, but is very well concealed in the sense that across different U.S. administrations—Obama, the first Trump administration, into Biden, and even now—there is a sense that the U.S. does not fundamentally have the Saudi states back. And this was kind of best epitomized by, for instance, the 2019 Abqaif Hreis attacks, where drones had kind of put out over 50 percent of Saudi oil production capacity in a day.
It was attributed to different actors, potentially Iranian-aligned proxies. But there was a sense that the Trump administration—and again, this was in 2019—the Trump administration was seen to be ideologically more positive towards Saudi Arabia. I mean, the first overseas visit of Trump, both in the first and second administrations, was to the kingdom.
Something to note was that he didn’t have their back. So the Saudi elites kind of had to deal with multiple crises, and there was really kind of two pathways. One was, of course, pursuing internal reform and strengthening.
The other was trying to achieve kind of a new type of relationship with the United States, either in terms of signing a formal security treaty—which never happened, and I think the challenges for it are still quite significant—or in kind of acquiring enough power to take its own strategic course. Now, having said all that, where does China sit in? The interesting part is that Saudi elites—and here we’re looking at elites that are close to policymaking circles, people who are embedded in the media, who kind of sometimes throw out ideas to gauge public receptivity or even reflect kind of the inner logic of the court—is that you can see that China is not seen as part of Saudi Arabia’s security horizon.
The strategic options are either formalizing the security relationship with the United States—and there’s a lot of structural reasons to why Saudi elites think that way—or really acquiring enough strategic independence to go your own way.
ERIC OLANDER: And that’s very typical, though, of a lot of countries that say, we depend on China for trade, we look to the United States for security. So in many ways, Saudi Arabia is not unique in that dynamic. Absolutely.
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: Andrea, do you want to say something on that? Because I have some thoughts on it.
ANDREA GHISELLI: No, absolutely. I think, you know, it’s the fact that, in a way, just building on what Eric said, that many countries see this way. But I think one of the things that we try to highlight, especially the conclusion of the book, where we try to extrapolate our results and try to make a broader point of what’s going to happen in the region, right?
So should, you know, which countries are likely to do what and which countries are likely to do something else? Is that exactly, you know, yes, you’re right, Eric, that many countries think in this way, but what we try to point out is only some countries can actually do it. And the Saudis case shows that you must A, have the resources, material, political, institutional ones, and also be in a position with the United States, but also with China, which you can play the two sides, you know, maybe against each other, in a case you can, you’re not that far from both.
But if you look at the other countries in the region, there are very few others that can do the same. Because some look at Syria, for example, at least actually Syria is completely in the opposite situation, no resources and a clear and dynamic relationship with the US, which essentially zeroed its capability of really advancing its own agenda. And all the other countries are somewhat in between the spectrum.
ERIC OLANDER: But Mohammed, one of the reasons why the Saudis look to the United States for weapons and for military technology was because for a long time, US hardware was vastly better. We’re starting to see now that Chinese technology is closing that gap, Chinese drones, the J-10s, maybe they’re not quite at the same level as where the US is today, but they’re certainly getting closer. Do you see that dynamic maybe changing as Chinese military technology catches up with the US that maybe the Saudis say we want to diversify our arsenal a little bit, and maybe they will take a fleet of J-10s, for example?
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: I mean, I think, look, our kind of projection is really to the late 2020s, early 2030s, right? I mean, of course, beyond that temporal frame, I think it’s an open question how things will evolve. Yeah.
Even to the 20s, I’m fascinated by how you can see that far out. I mean, I think for the next few years, certain things will hold. So for instance, when it comes to, say, military hardware, it’s very difficult for a lot of states in the region, whether Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Egypt, all of whom are investing, by the way, in developing their own defense sectors and developing kind of local production capacities to really de-link from American armaments, right?
I mean, the idea of, for example, the Saudi Air Force acquiring Chinese hardware is a very difficult proposition because much of it is American. The pilots are trained. They’re logistically tied to the American military-industrial complex.
And there’s also kind of implied political kind of entanglements there. I think it was McGurk, actually, who has now kind of left the Biden administration. He used to be their main advisor on Middle Eastern affairs, who now has gone into the private sector and kind of tying the different technology corporations in the U.S. with Saudi Arabia. And he had a very interesting interview that I saw a few weeks ago where he was essentially saying that, you know, if there is a decision for a country to adopt, say, anti-aircraft missiles, right, systems from China, that would impose certain sanctions from the United States. And Saudi Arabia, for example, own hardware for anti-aircraft, the THAAD missile systems, which is the most advanced right now, is all from the United States. And they’ve just finished training three regiments.
So there’s structural forces at play that would make any such shift very slow. And, you know, just kind of maybe tie all of this together, if I may. What we’re trying to do with the book is, and some people will say, OK, so what this is known, is that we’re really trying to highlight the discourses among Chinese policymakers or people adjacent to them, as well as local elites.
Because often what we see is the dominance of particular narrative frames that think about, for example, the Middle East as a theater of competition between the U.S. and China. But when you talk to Saudi elites, for example, and I would wager it’s the same for the Emiratis and others, they might see this competition playing out in certain discrete dimensions, but they don’t necessarily see that they’re facing a choice between the U.S. and China at a much higher strategic level. They see that ultimately all their eggs are in a U.S. basket, at least for the time being.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, let’s talk about some of these narratives, and that’s really the thrust of the book. When we hear in both in the Gulf and Middle Eastern press, as well as in the U.S. media, we hear sometimes two very stark, divergent narratives. So on the one hand, from the U.S., oftentimes we hear that China is going to be the new military power in the Middle East, that Chinese warships are now sailing the Persian Gulf, and therefore we need to step up our engagement to prevent China from becoming the new hegemonic power. So put that to one side. We also hear another narrative whereby the Chinese are incapable of affecting realities on the ground in the Middle East, and as we saw with the U.S. B-2 bombing attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, there was a lot of, you know, chest-thumping in the United States saying China could never do that, so they’re so weak in the Middle East. So you have these two very different narratives.
I think people in the Gulf region themselves are sometimes confused between whether China is the new hegemonic power or China is not the new hegemonic power. So they don’t really recognize Chinese power in the way that imperial powers of the past have come to the region, whether it was the British or the Americans or the Soviets in the Cold War. So thinking about those narratives, you guys put together some key questions, which I thought was very interesting, and that framed your scenarios, and I want to dive into these scenarios, but first these questions.
You said, are we on the precipice of a post-American Chinese hegemony in the region? So you addressed that, one of those extreme narratives, and then you said, or are we reaching the outer limits of what is feasible within what are essentially transactional ties? So there’s the limits on the other side of that.
China just wants to do business, it doesn’t really care that much about it. Let’s start with those questions. I’ve got three scenarios that I want to get through to be able to articulate.
Andrea, let’s start with you in terms of how you framed those questions.
ANDREA GHISELLI: Yeah, well, we thought pretty much like you did, we saw the debate in which Mohammed and I participate more or less actively, and these extremes that come out, sometimes we thought, these are so important questions, why don’t we look at the actual people involved in this in the very first place? Even if we imagine the forthcoming Chinese hegemony in the Middle East, then we would expect both people in China and in the region to agree to that, to be wanting that. Otherwise, we would expect something else.
And these were essentially where the three scenarios that we developed come from, because we believe that these are extremes, but they’re different sub-scenarios in between, right? And they really depend on what people in China and people in the region want and are capable of. Of course, we mentioned at the end of the book, there are factors that might change our findings, maybe in the future, but we thought we have to start with listening to what people in the region think and want.
ERIC OLANDER: Okay, let’s dive into the three scenarios. Mohammed, scenario number one that you stake out in the book, and I’ll just read it here. The future of Sino-Middle Eastern ties is likely to be more of a stable continuation of what had existed since the late 1990s, with China being an important economic partner, but little beyond that.
Tell us about that scenario.
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: I mean, this is the scenario we appraise to be the most likely. And it’s certainly the one that is reflected in the mental mapping that we’ve done among local elites in the region, as well as among Chinese elites. That is to say, they put a lot of importance to their engagement, right, and their cooperation in the economic realm.
And certainly, this is not to say that the economic engagement is stagnant. It’s evolving in new directions, it’s taking new forms, and it certainly will continue to evolve, right. But we don’t necessarily see in that scenario that relations will take a fundamental strategic shift, whereby China becomes part of the security architecture in the region, that we’ll see Chinese military bases in the Persian Gulf, or we’ll see Chinese involvement and intervention in kind of local conflicts.
We kind of appraise that as unlikely, and those are kind of the basic hallmarks of the scenario, continuation of what exists. And it’s something that is either going to see continued American presence, or even an American departure where the region kind of reconfigures and figures out its own security architecture.
ERIC OLANDER: Okay, so if that’s the most likely, the middle scenario now, Andrea, Chinese, Saudi, and Assadist Syrian narratives. And again, we’re talking about Bashar al-Assad when he was in power in Syria before 2023. And you’re saying in this scenario, they’ve co-evolved towards a new consensus, wherein they all anticipate greater and unprecedented PRC engagement in regional governance and security issues.
So a dramatic change of the Chinese presence, an increase of the Chinese presence in the region. Tell us about that scenario.
ANDREA GHISELLI: Yeah, in this scenario, we imagine both people in the region and in Beijing agreeing that China must do more, should do more, and should somewhat play a role that is more similar to that of the United States. Specifically, the form of this deeper engagement might depend on the specific consensus agreed, but both sides say, we want us or we want you to do more. And the results are not really, especially this is not to say that there is no some debate at all on this issue on if and how China could do more, neither in the region nor in China.
In China, there’s been for a long time, people saying, we should do something, we should be more proactive. Proactive is really the keyword they usually use because, and they frame being reactive as a consistently like a longstanding negative feature of China’s strategy toward the region. So there’s been for a long time, something like we should do more.
But actually, when they try to explain what more actually means, this is where there’s no consensus at all. And basically where it seems to be the debate is basically stuck, which I would take as there’s no favorite position, neither at the top, probably there’s no real serious discussion, you know, policymakers about that if the debate is stuck here. And the same, we find it in Saudi Arabia, for example, and Mohammed can definitely add to that.
Basically, there’s some people that muse about it, but it’s nothing more than some speculation, really. It’s no serious discussion.
ERIC OLANDER: And that’s exactly what we’ve heard from any number of other scholars that just point out that on a security basis, this region that you’re focusing on just isn’t that important to China when you compare it to Southeast Asia, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and its sphere of influence in the Asia Pacific region, which is the primary security concern for the Chinese. So the idea of a massive uptick in Chinese security presence in the Persian Gulf and Middle East seems unlikely when I get the sense that what you’re saying. But let’s, Mohammed, go to the third scenario, which, you know, maybe when you wrote the book seemed far-fetched, but today doesn’t seem quite as far-fetched.
And the third and final scenario features narratives that are out of sync with one another, discordant perceptions of the regional order and China’s place in it. It’s more of a chaos type of environment, but it seems that as the international system, as we’ve known it for all of our lives, seems to be breaking down in some pretty fundamental ways, chaos is not entirely out of the question, Mohammed.
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: Absolutely. I think in this particular scenario, what we were anticipating that in analyzing these three cases, there would be very different narrational strands, right? That, for example, in the case of, say, Assadist Syria, there would be a narrative of talking about China as a distinct military ally, calling for Chinese intervention and involvement.
And that, for example, the Chinese side wouldn’t reciprocate this or it would be flipped, right? That there are kind of different assumptions about what these elites want in terms of China’s role in the regional order. But what we actually found is that notwithstanding certain issues, there’s actually very interesting consistency across the ideological spectrum, right?
And across different national capabilities. And we anticipate, given that Andrei and I follow kind of local debates in the region quite closely, that this is the same in Turkey, Iran, Egypt, notwithstanding, of course, the particularities, but local elites are not interested in having China become embedded in the regional security architecture, at least in a way akin to that of the United States. And this kind of stands in huge contrast to the Anglophone debate we see.
So you could say our contribution is kind of modest, like, yes, our findings are common sense to people who watch and follow the China-Middle East relations closely or China’s global footprint as you do. But there is such a markedly big gap between how China is debated in English among policymaking circles, think tanks, and some academic knowledge production, and what actually local actors are saying about the nature of these relations, right? I mean, I heard it constantly in the past two years about Iran being, and even longer than that in some ways, of Iran being part of the Eurasian axis, right?
That also includes China. And that China will defend Iran if push comes to shove. And we saw a complete absence of China in the 12-Day War, right?
I mean, this is just an instance of how there are these kind of big discrepancies in the narratives. And there’s an importance on focusing on the local. What are the local debates to just get a sense of their mental world map, right?
ERIC OLANDER: That’s right. That is very much a MAGA narrative that we heard on Fox News. People like Gordon Chang and others are kind of pushing that out.
If I understand correctly, and again, I may be wrong here, so please correct me, does all three of your scenarios presuppose American relative influence decline in the region?
ANDREA GHISELLI: No, not really. I mean, of course, there has been for a long time part of the Chinese debate emphasizing this idea of American withdrawal or contraction, as you can more closely translate it. But I think it’s more like a narrative device, really, than an actual assessment of American presence.
And so not the same, I think, is true elsewhere in other countries. So we don’t think that that’s what people in Beijing or elsewhere think. And it’s neither like a real assumption for us in the sense that, in my opinion, and if I remember correctly, Mohamed correct me, is that we don’t really see a decrease of presence, a change of American presence, right?
A different manifestation of American power, maybe, that follows different logics. But you don’t see really, you know, a clear decrease in terms of what American can do, right? There’s a very interesting article that I read a couple of days ago, CENTCOM, the American command that focuses on the Middle East being compared to the quantum army for Japan, such an important and gigantic bureaucratic element, the pillar of American strategy, it’s not really going to change, really.
And indeed, as soon as something required American intervention, you had the bombers flying immediately. So we don’t assume that, and I don’t think that’s the case, really.
ERIC OLANDER: And there’s really no constituency in the United States that has enough power to decrease the Pentagon budget, and much less the presence in the Middle East or in the CENTCOM zone, as you pointed out. So I think that’s a very reasonable assumption. Your book, again, I mentioned, is free.
That’s very exciting for an academic book, because most of them are just ridiculously expensive. And we’ll put a link to the book in the show notes. It’s also, again, I mentioned, rather short at just 70 pages, which is also merciful on your part, because many academic books tend to be very, very long.
I’d like to get both of you to give us just some final perspectives on what you want people to take away from this. You’ve given these scenarios, you’ve talked about these two countries, you’ve talked about a lot of the big mega trends that have been shaping Chinese engagement in this region. But Mohamed, what’s the key takeaway that you want people to pick up from this book?
MOHAMMED ALSUDAIRI: The key takeaway is that we have to question the received paradigms in terms of how we frame China-Middle East relations, and to really look at the local level, in terms of the discourses, in terms of the case studies, because that reveals a very completely different vision from what prevails at the level of the paradigm. And I think also the other major key takeaway is we shouldn’t assume that even if you have an ascended China, and China, in some ways, is already kind of a peer competitor to the United States and is pushing back on different arenas, will necessarily pursue its hegemony in the same way as the United States. If we think of, say, the contrast between the US and British imperial expressions of power, the British Imperium looked at different geographies strategically in a distinct way from its US successor.
So we shouldn’t assume that just because the US appraises and values the Middle East, that this will necessarily follow when we have a Chinese hegemony, if it ever comes to pass. I think this is kind of the mistaken frame that a lot of people have. They see, oh, there’s energy-rich resources, but they ignore the ways in which the energy relationship is changing, and they assume that therefore China wants to embed itself in the region.
And when you look at the local debates in Beijing, among policymakers, we get a very different view that offers a corrective. So that’s kind of the major takeaways, I would say, that I would like people to leave from the book. Sure.
ERIC OLANDER: And Andrea, what about you? What do you want people to take away from the book?
ANDREA GHISELLI: I completely share what Mohamed says, so I will not just repeat them. But maybe a more technical thing, which is the one that I really enjoy about doing such kind of research, the importance of looking at trying, at least, because, of course, gaining access to top policymakers, at least in the countries where that with the installation is basically impossible, or if you have, you cannot, of course, talk about it in any case. So in any case, I think we offer a good attempt, at the very least, of how to try to go beyond the usual, assuming that all countries want the same and so on.
But actually, that there are ways and approaches that we can adopt in order to produce a bit more nuanced. And I think not just nuance, because nuance sometimes is seen as a bit dovish, but actually more realistic, I think, is a key word analysis of what’s going on. I think this is very important, of course, with all the caveats and limits, right, that comes with trying to look not very transparent societies and foreign policies is never transparent, regardless of where you are.
But nonetheless, that we know that it’s possible to try to do a bit more sophisticated analysis. And I think that, again, this is then obviously, but sometimes people ignore it, is the obvious necessary foundation, really, to understand what’s going on in the world, and especially when it comes to China, because always assume more power, more ambition, right? But actually, when you look at China, you see more power, more questions about what to do.
And I think you see the same in Saudi, right? You clearly have, instead of a clear goal, but also different types of anxieties and questions that come out. And these are very important.
These are not nuances, right? These are clearly, these are things that matter every day when we look at events in the region.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, you’re right that it is one of the more complex relationships that China has anywhere in the world. And the book is an important contribution to helping us figure out what may happen, these different scenarios. Again, you don’t prescribe one per se, but you do kind of indicate that some are more likely than others.
We will put a link to the book, again, in the show notes, and I highly recommend everybody to take a look at it. Again, it is free. So go get a PDF of it.
Just click on the link in the show notes, Narratives of Sino-Middle Eastern Futures. May I just add one thing? Yeah, go ahead.
ANDREA GHISELLI: Also, don’t forget the work we do at the China Med Project, because we do a lot of this, and I’m really proud of what we do. And this book builds on this. So I just want to say it before I forget.
ERIC OLANDER: No, of course. And we’re thrilled to be able to showcase some of the great work that the China Med Project does on our site as well. And so we’ll put a link to the China Med Project.
I highly recommend that you also subscribe. In addition to the China Med Project, in addition to downloading this book, Andrea, you have a new sub-stack that’s out into the world. Tell everybody about your sub-stack as well and what you’re doing.
ANDREA GHISELLI: It’s a Substack full of typos, because I usually write it when I have just thoughts, and I write them down. But I try to offer some perspectives on Chinese foreign policy, especially look at what scholars write and give some comments.
ERIC OLANDER: At least all the typos reveal that you’re not using AI to write your sub-stack. Or maybe I’m asking AI to write them. Okay, you just completely undermined it.
Anyway, we’ll put links to all of that. These are fantastic resources to be able to help you to understand what’s happening in this very, very important region. Again, the book, Narratives of Sino-Middle Eastern Futures, written by our good friends, Mohamed Al-Sudari, who’s a lecturer at the Centre for Arabic and Islamic Studies at Australian National University in Canberra, and Andrea Giselli, a lecturer at the University and also the head of research at the China Med Project.
Mohamed, Andrea, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Thank you so much for having us. Pleasure.
And we’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South podcast. And of course, if you want to follow all the work that the team in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and soon Latin America, we’re launching our Spanish service very, very soon. We’re in the process of hiring an editor right now.
If you’d like to follow all the great work that they’re doing, go to ChinaglobalSouth.com. And of course, we won’t survive without your support and to produce agenda-free, fact-based analysis, the kind of research and showcasing what Mohamed and Andrea are doing. So the best way you can support us is to subscribe.
Go to ChinaglobalSouth.com slash subscribe. If you are a student or a teacher, another reminder, you get half off. Send me an email, eric at ChinaglobalSouth.com, and I’ll send you the links for those $10 subscriptions, very affordable. Well, that’ll do it. We’ll be back again next week. Until then, thank you so much for listening and for watching.
