战后中国与海湾国家关系将走向何方？

In late March I wrote a couple of posts here musing on what the Gulf will look like after the war, and expected to write something immediately after about how I see China’s position in the region looking. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to sit on it for a bit to see if any surprises emerged.

Since then we’ve had the China-Pakistan 5-point peace plan, the China-Russia veto on Bahrain’s UN resolution to reopen Hormuz, rumours of Beijing getting Iran to go along with the ceasefire and agree to talks in Islamabad, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince visiting Beijing where Xi rolled out yet another 4-point plan, a Xi-MBS phone call, and Xi complaining that the US has taken us back to the “law of the jungle”, all while China’s economy starts to show vulnerability to consequences of the war. So there are a lot of useful data points there, but nothing that fundamentally challenged my original assumptions.

I’ve been thinking about China-Israel in 2017 a lot lately. That was a peak hype moment. That March PM Netanyahu visited Beijing and the two governments announced that they’d agreed to an ‘innovation comprehensive partnership’, which is a unique designation in Chinese diplomacy as far as I know. According to Xinhua, part of the partnership meant “the two countries agree to closer exchanges among young technological personnel, and cooperation in joint labs, a global technology transfer center, innovation parks and an innovative cooperation center.”

What it meant in real terms was a lot of synergy between two very entrepreneurial and technologically advanced countries. In May there was a China-Israel Technology Transfer and Investment Conference in Zhengzhou, in June the 3rd China-Israel Investment Summit was held in Hong Kong, and in November the Israel-China Hi-Tech Investment Summit was held in Haifa. That September Israeli Economic Minister Eli Cohen gave an interview to Xinhua where he said, “We are willing to see more Chinese companies operating in Israel and in the next 30 years we will see more tremendous technological change, and we are willing to increase the cooperation between China and Israel." There was legitimate momentum.

A decade later there is very little. In 2022 I was at an event in Tel Aviv where a former US official was trying to convince his Israeli audience why they needed a CFIUS-like agency to ensure that there weren’t back doors for Chinese entities to negatively impact Israeli security through investment. I spoke with a businessman who worked in the tech sector and he was dismissive of the need, saying the business community, especially tech, was hyper vigilant about any cooperation with China by that point. He described normal concerns about IP protection and the perils of competing with such a huge market. And he also said that if an Israeli company had Chinese partnerships on the books, it would undermine their much more important relationships with the US and Europe. So basically he was describing a situation where a lot of that 2017 momentum had fizzled within 5 years.

China and Israel still trade a lot but nobody would describe the partnership as either comprehensive or innovative.

It’s a long detour, but I bring it up because I think we may be approaching a similar dynamic in China’s relations with the GCC countries. When I started working on my PhD on China-GCC relations in 2011, there was a common assumption in the Gulf that China was an important energy customer, but if it wanted to be taken seriously the relationship would need to develop beyond a seller-buyer dynamic.

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