How do Middle Eastern countries engage with Chinese economic diplomacy? A comparative analysis of Egypt and Saudi Arabia

Abstract

How do Middle Eastern countries engage with Chinese economic diplomacy? This apparently simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet it is one that requires a response, because, over the past two or three decades – and particularly since the Arab Spring of 2010/11, when many regional states lost confidence in the support of Western partners – the relationship between Beijing and the Middle East has intensified to the extent that, in certain respects, it has transcended a straightforward set of trade or commercial linkages to encompass something much deeper and more strategic, grounded in shared preferences that may even be reshaping the region’s political economy. Indeed, some countries have even come to rely on Chinese investment and markets to such a degree that they are fully embedding their own development strategies within the emerging framework of its Belt and Road Initiative. However, despite these transformations, and certainly compared to other developing regions like Africa and Latin America, there is precious little scholarly research on the subject. In part, this reflects difficulties of access, but it is also because the region’s own distinctive profile – it comprises a range of non-democratic Arab and non-Arab countries, many of them also rentier states, and is relatively proximate to China – renders it quite different in key respects. This thesis seeks to redress the balance and contributes to filling this gap. It reviews the existing literature on China’s engagement in Africa and Latin America, and from this it distils three positions that might be applied to comprehending perceptions of the Middle Eastern equivalent: Sino-optimist, Sino-pessimist, and Sino-pragmatist. It then deploys a constructivist theoretical framework to examine contemporary Chinese economic diplomacy in two quite different Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia: the former a larger but poorer and more diverse economy requiring infrastructural upgrading, the latter a smaller but wealthier rentier economy requiring economic diversification. It situates this analysis within their evolving contemporary relationship with the People’s Republic of China. At the end of the thesis, the study reflects on the extent to which a prevailing Sino-pragmatist account of these processes appears the most appropriate way to understand them, before outlining three broad contributions to knowledge: partly filling the empirical gap regarding Chinese economic diplomacy in the Middle East; adding to existing debates on Chinese engagement in the non-West through the distillation of the optimist-pessimist-pragmatist framing; and offering a recipient-centric view of Chinese diplomacy.