In the Middle East, the Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born
In December 2022, Chinese president Xi Jinping attended the first China-Arab States Summit and the China-GCC Summit in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh. During his three-day visit, Xi also held a separate meeting with the Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The much-anticipated visit generated speculation over the possibility of a qualitative shift in the relations between China and Saudi Arabia, traditionally a key United States ally in the region.
Fast forward to May 2024, Saudi Arabia was once more in the international news. On 2 May, the Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post revealed a plan drafted by Netanyahu’s cabinet for the future of the Gaza Strip. The ‘Plan for the Transformation of the Gaza Strip’, or Gaza 2035 as it was dubbed, aims to incorporate Gaza into a new Free Economic Zone that will include Israel’s Sderot and Egypt’s Al Arish and that will be connected via railway to the new Saudi mega-project NEOM (see image).
These two seemingly unrelated developments reveal a great deal about the nature of ongoing regional transformations, as various key Middle Eastern states get pulled towards China’s rising sphere of influence and are simultaneously called upon to guarantee the survival of the traditional US-dominated order. US and Chinese interests are generally understood as rivalling each other, furthering polarisation between states. However, these recent developments suggest that the rise of China may in fact be contributing towards regional integration and the heightening of pre-existing inequality, power hierarchies, and violence, as currently witnessed in Palestine.
Sino-Saudi relations: towards a higher-level of synergy
Relations between China and Saudi Arabia have been steadily deepening over the last decade. Economic data shows both quantitative and qualitative trends towards higher degrees of cooperation. Chinese FDI in Saudi Arabia has seen a major increase, peaking at US$654 million in 2019, signalling an interest in long-term economic activity of Chinese firms and investors in the Kingdom. In 2022, Saudi Arabia also became the largest recipient of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investments at a value of US$5.5 billion.
The two countries have expanded the scope of their cooperation in a bid to reach a comprehensive strategic framework that seeks to ‘synergize Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 with the Belt and Road cooperation.’ Although not all details have yet been disclosed, the 2022 bilateral summit held up its promises resulting in the signing of 34 investment agreements valued at around US$30 billion in various fields such as green energy, information technology, transportation, logistics, and construction.
Notably, the two countries also signed a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership agreement,’ the second-highest tier agreement in Chinese cooperation. The partnership will allow Saudi Arabia to channel more investments into its ambitious projects of integrated infrastructure, industrial, and urban development and allow China to secure a steady import of oil and further its BRI global development strategy.
These significant developments have raised suspicion in some quarters linked to the United States policy establishment. For example, a Washington-based think tank noted that while Chinese investments in infrastructure do not contradict the aims of US-sponsored development in the region, the expansion of economic ties in magnitude and scope between China and the GCC will soon determine whether the Middle East is going to become ‘the theatre of strategic rivalry’ between the two powers.
But to what extent are emerging regional ties with China posing a direct threat to US interests and to the existing balance of power?
Integration and competition in the region
Through its growing bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia, the other GCC states, and increasingly Israel, China may appear to risk unsettling the existing regional balance of power and US dominance in the region. In reality, China has a keen interest in maintaining regional stability, especially as large-scale investments in infrastructure and logistics are turning the region into a key node of global trade.
It is evident then that while tensions between the two main global powers are on the rise, China’s role in the Middle East does not yet pose a challenge to the United States’ main objective in the region, which is Israel’s full integration into the region through a normalisation agreement with Saudi Arabia.
However, as GCC states get quickly pulled into China’s orbit, these new dynamics might lead to regional instability by transforming intra-GCC relations. The recent wave of investment in the construction of maritime logistics infrastructure in the Gulf catering to Chinese exports, for example, has been shown to constitute a powerful driver of competition among GCC states.
Crucially, Chinese investments in infrastructure projects are not per se perceived as a challenge to US interests. According to analysts close to Washington, the expansion of China-GCC cooperation to the spheres of cybersecurity and military technology ‘should be perceived,’ from Washington’s point of view, ‘very differently from hard infrastructure projects.’
Integration and competition are emerging as the two key underlying dynamics shaping political and economic transformation in the region. The large-scale construction of new infrastructures across the region should be considered as the crucial driver of such dynamics and an indicator of where the region is headed. It is also likely to become the central site of political contestation and arena for confrontation between competing visions over the region’s future.
The old is dying and the new cannot be born
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci explained the rise of fascism as the outcome of what he described as an interregnum, a period of crisis of hegemony within the capitalist system in which the existing political and social order is in a profound crisis and alternative political projects struggle to emerge. It is in these conjunctures that we experience the emergence of ‘monsters.’
Current transformations in the Middle East can be understood as an interregnum. Shifts in the global balance of power away from US unipolarity are reverberating strongly in the region. However, the regional geopolitical scaffolding of US power has not yet been replaced by a new paradigm. After brokering the Iran-Saudi deal in 2023, Beijing has scaled back its diplomatic activism. China’s moderate position in the current war on Gaza is a testament to its inability – and unwillingness – to replace Washington as the guarantor of the regional order.
Periods of crisis such as the current one offer opportunities for social and political change, but also risk heightening existing unequal and violent power structures. Palestinians are currently taking the brunt of the (re)emergence of one of the long-lasting ‘monsters’ in the region, Israel’s settler colonial project. The horrific genocide committed by Israel with Western support is the most extreme – yet not the sole – example of the extent of the violence that underpins imperial interests in the region and that resurfaces powerfully whenever such interests are threatened.
China’s role in the remaking of the region into the heart of global logistics is contributing to the unsettling old geopolitical paradigms, but that per se is not good news for the Palestinians. Gaza 2035 stands as a reminder that economic transformation in the region continues to depend on the ability of regional states to use state violence to enable the accumulation and circulation of capital and to suppress any form of resistance to the status quo and prevent the rise of alternative visions for a more just regional order.
* Francesco Amoruso is Lecturer in Political Economy at Boston University and Honorary Research Fellow at the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter. This blog was developed through discussions at the Mapping Connections Institute, held in Beirut between 27th – 30th May 2024 as part of the ‘Inter-Asia Week’ (Inter-Asia Partnership). The views expressed are the personal perspectives of the writer and not attributable to the Mapping Connections partner institutions.