China, the Arab World, and Silk Road Diplomacy: Towards a New World Order

Abstract

The relationship between China and the Arab world is age-old. China and the Arabian nations have been linked with each other by both land and the maritime Silk Road since the last 2000 years. The long history of friendship, cooperation, peace, and openness has enabled the People’s Republic of China to establish cordial friendships and diplomatic ties with at least 22 Arab states. Nearly 75 years of diplomatic and political relations have further deepened China-Arab relations in other areas of cooperation also. Beijing has set up a strategic dialogue mechanism with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) through its comprehensive strategic partnership with eight of the central Arab countries. Today, China is the biggest importer of crude oil from the Arab region and is the 7th biggest overall trading partner. China’s recent Belt and Road Initiative also known as the One Belt, One Road (OBOR), was presented as one of the most ambitious economic and foreign policy efforts of President Xi Jinping. It promised a vast network of infrastructure building, economic development, and constructions of connectivity facilities throughout China’s neighbourhood running from Beijing to Asia, Europe, and Africa, with the Arab world at the centre. In the process of pursuing the Silk Road in the Arab world, China has proposed an initiative of establishing a “1 + 2 + 3” cooperation pattern with the Arab countries by taking energy cooperation as the core, infrastructure construction, and trade and investment facilitation as the two wings, and three high and new technology fields of nuclear energy, space satellite capabilities and new forms of energy generation as the three breakthroughs, and industrial capacity cooperation serving as the foundation. Undoubtedly, the transcontinental and transoceanic Silk Road networks of China are steadily reshaping the world’s political and economic landscape by promoting each other's advantages and potentials, trade and investment to achieve common progress and development. In lieu of this, the larger question which this chapter would like to focus on is how the Arab world is seeing this Silk Road Project of China which many claim to be Beijing’s plan to redesign the underlying geopolitical structure. Whether China is likely to respond to the people’s needs and their cultural aspirations will also be called into question, with the chapter concluding with an examination of whether this will merely be an extension of the existing drive towards globalisation.