By Shannon Tiezzi
The first “Arab Policy Paper” provides Beijing’s official vision for China-Middle East relations.
On Wednesday, one week before Chinese President Xi Jinping is reportedly scheduled to arrive in Egypt for his first visit to the Middle East, China issued a lengthy explanation of its approach to the region in a document titled “China’s Arab Policy Paper.” The paper briefly traces the history of China-Arab relations, from exchanges via the ancient Silk Road to the founding of the China-Arab State Cooperation Forum in 2004, before outlining China’s plan for expanding cooperation in the future.
Some caveats, first: like China’s 2015 policy paper on Africa, the “Arab Policy Paper” does not lay out specific policies for specific countries (in fact, there’s not a single country named in the paper, besides China). The paper presents a blanket vision for regional relations, without getting in to the complexities of how that vision will be realized in bilateral relationships with individual states. This is a paper about China’s approach to “Arab countries,” not China’s approach to say, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. For China’s purposes, the “Arab countries” are those with membership in the League of Arab States, which serves as the basis of the China-Arab State Cooperation Forum.
Right now, China’s relationship with the Arab world is largely defined by its energy imports — meaning, of course, oil. As the policy paper notes, “Arab countries as a whole have become China’s biggest supplier of crude oil.” The full truth is even more striking: Saudi Arabia alone is China’s largest supplier of oil, and when you factor in Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, the Arab world accounts for over 40 percent of China’s total oil imports.
Read the full story at The Diplomat