On Thursday 6 April 2023, the ACRPS Strategic Studies Unit held a lecture titled “China’s Strategy in the Gulf Region” featuring Abdullah Baabood, Chair of the State of Qatar for Islamic Area Studies at Waseda University in Japan, and Alan Chong, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Pluralism Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The session was chaired by Imad Mansour, Assistant Professor in the Masters in Critical Security Studies program at the Doha Institute.

In the first intervention, Baabood focused on relations between the GCC states and China, showing they are long-standing and that their development in the 20^th century was impeded by colonial powers in the Arab region, as well as the hesitancy of the Gulf states to establish relations with China given the latter’s backing of leftist movements. But by the 1980s, the Gulf states had begun to forge diplomatic ties with China, the last of them being Saudi Arabia in 1990. Baabood showed that economic relations are considered the mainstay of Gulf-China relations: whereas most petroleum and energy exports had been to Western countries, the Gulf states started shifting toward Asia, China in particular. This is because the United States does not rely heavily on Gulf oil, in addition to European efforts to diversify energy sources. Moreover, China-Gulf commercial exchange was on the rise for the past two decades until 2020 when China became the GCC’s largest trade partner, taking the place of the EU. Beijing has also sought to increase Chinese investments in the Gulf, which according to some estimates amount to USD 100 billion.

Baabood contended that Gulf-China relations go beyond energy security and economic considerations. Although China has not yet reached the same level of global power as the United States and has not greatly interfered in Gulf security affairs, its political role in the region is growing. This has been evident in China’s sponsorship of the Iran-Saudi deal on 10 March 2023; the Saudi Council of Ministers’ decision to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as a “dialogue partner” on 28 March 2023; and the meeting of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Beijing in early April of that year.

During the second intervention, Alan Chong addressed the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, announced in 2013, and the fact that it has revived development discourse in Asian international relations by attending to issues of infrastructure, strengthening economic ties between Asian states, and offering privileges to countries targeted by the initiative through concluding economic agreements and allowing flexibility in loan repayment.

Whereas the initiative is thought to reflect China’s interests as a great power and demonstrate the congruent trajectories of economic and military strength, Chong argued that reality is somewhat different by making three points. First, China offers Asia as a whole a vision for internal reconnection in service of development and prosperity. Second, infrastructure modernization is the most pressing item on the economic security agenda of most Asian states. Third, most Asian states tend to behave pragmatically in relation to cooperation for economic development, making it possible to do away with ideology in service of propelling development.