Is China forging an alternative Middle Eastern order?

Dawn Murphy's new account of China's long-term strategy in Africa, the Middle East and the Global South

Dawn Murphy, China’s Rise in the Global South: The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing’s Alternative World Order (Stanford University Press 2022).

China’s recent brokering of a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran focused a lot of attention on its rising role in the Middle East, and more broadly across the global south. I’ve tended to think that a lot of the discussion of China’s role in the Middle East has asked the wrong questions. It has always seemed obvious to me that, like any great power historically, China would seek the means to control and defend access to areas of vital national interest — and China’s extreme dependence on energy from the Gulf obviously makes it that. China’s political and military underperformance in the Middle East has always seemed the more interesting question: why, given its obvious vital national interests, did it not do more to expand its military capabilities and political influence there?

At the same time, the ever-escalating focus in Washington on global competition with China always seemed to me to be risking a misreading of how that played out in the Middle East. The assumption of an emergent Cold War-style global ideological and political struggle between the US and China would naturally make the Middle East appear to be the kind of arena for biploar geopolitical competition which it was for much of the Cold War. In that kind of zero-sum, bipolar thinking, any gain for China would necessarily be a loss for the United States — and vice versa. But it has never been clear that the emergent global multipolarity — or, perhaps, nonpolarity — quite fits the logic of bipolarity. The hedging behavior of regional powers, as they build diverse portfolios of alliance partners, simultaneously striking massive new arms deals with the United States and refusing to fully commit to American global policy priorities like the defense of Ukraine, seems to suggest that they don’t see it that way either.

It seems to me that even if China and the US are increasingly globally competitive, and China is ever more present economically and politically in the MENA region, they actually mostly share the same interests in the Gulf. Both, above all, want the energy to keep flowing and to avoid any systemic disruption. Maybe during the Trump years there were some who wanted military action against Iran, avoiding such a war and the energy disruptions it would cause has been a priority for Team Biden - and most sensible people, including since the 2019 Abqaiq attacks, the Saudi leadership. And maybe China advocated a model of authoritarian governance and extreme domestic surveillance which challenged American rhetoric about liberal democracy — but, please, show me the last time that Washington actually prioritized democracy or human rights in the Gulf.

Dawn Murphy of the National War College (and, I’m proud to say, a recent George Washington University PhD) recently published a fascinating book which offers alternative readings of China’s strategy in the Global South which helps to bridge many of these debates and make sense of what is — and isn’t — going on. She suggests that China is indeed promoting an alternative international order — but that this promotion looks very different across different parts of the world, and only challenges the existing American-led order in certain areas, in certain ways.

Last week I spoke to Murphy on the Middle East Political Science Podcast, and you can listen to our conversation here.

Murphy does a great job of laying out the full scope of the growth of China’s presence across the Middle East and Africa. That growth is genuinely impressive, building up deep infrastructures of interdependence and shared interest between Beijing and regional states. I highly recommend the detailed discussions of the many strategic partnership agreements, regional forums, investments along the Belt and Road Initiative, and the evolving nature of both energy interdependence and, increasingly, food security. When it comes to the military side, she has a fascinating brief discussion of the establishment of China’s only naval base in the region in Djibouti — established in part to facilitate the protection of Chinese nationals at risk of being caught up in regional instability (as happened in Yemen and Libya) and carefully placed in a country hosting many other naval bases which wouldn’t trigger either Iranian or Arab sensitivities.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is her detailed analysis of how Chinese policy intellectuals and official policy conceptualize the Middle East. She shows that these Chinese perspectives have generally viewed the Middle East as an American sphere of influence, but one which is turbulent, dangerous and risky. Chinese policy there, as opposed to Africa, has been mostly willing to work within those contours - outsourcing military costs and geopolitical risk to the United States while steadily building economic interdependence and soft power. Murphy carefully distinguishes between those initiatives which support the existing international normative order and those which challenge it. Signing free trade agreements or deploying naval capabilities to combat piracy in the Indian Ocean are norm supporting even if they worry Americans, while promoting authoritiarianism and opposing sanctions over human rights and war crimes are norm contesting in the so-called liberal international order. In that context, I’d say that Chinese mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran is norm-supporting, promoting de-escalation and reducing the risk of war, even if it challenges US primacy.

I would recommend reading Murphy’s book alongside a number of other major recent publications on Chinese policy in the Middle East. Jonathan Fulton’s recent Routledge Handbook on China-Middle East Relations is eye-wateringly expensive, but if your library gets it then it’s a definitive collection. I’d also recommend the collection Asian Perspectives of Gulf Security, edited by Fulton and Li-Chen Sim. Fulton himself has written extensively on China in the Middle East, and everything he does is worth checking out (as is his fantastic podcast on the topic). Just outside the Middle East, I love Lina Benabdullah’s book Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network Building in China-Africa Relations. This is clearly a topic with long-term structural implications for the global place of the Middle East, and there’s a lot of room to explore it from multiple dimensions, and Murphy has given us a well-grounded and clearly written comparative intervention.