Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Saudi Arabia late on Wednesday, a visit that could deepen ties between the world‘s top oil importer and top oil exporter amid tensions between the United States and Saudi Arabia and a global power shake-up accelerated by the war in Ukraine.
Xi was greeted at Riyadh airport by Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Both sides say the relationship between the two countries is still dominated by economic relations. China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner and top buyer of its oil, a trend that is only expected to accelerate. But a growing military and geopolitical element in the two countries’ engagement is unnerving in Washington, which is now seeking to include U.S. adversaries in the energy-rich Middle East, long the dominant security force. More partners within.
The visit underscores China’s growing influence in the Middle East, where it has also developed ties with Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran, while most developing countries avoid Russia despite calls from the West Choose sides with Ukraine. The Saudi government, in particular, has said it wants to put its own interests first, but claims this is not to snub Washington in favor of Moscow or Beijing.
Analysts say China has not shown the interest or ability to displace the United States‘ broad influence in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia is reluctant to replace the United States, its main source of security. But in recent years, China has sold drones to Saudi Arabia, helped the kingdom build ballistic missiles, and helped build a facility to extract yellowcake uranium from uranium ore, which is necessary to develop civilian nuclear power or build a nuclear arsenal capability early stages of the China and Saudi Arabia are also already in talks to build a naval base in the Red Sea, one of the world‘s most strategic waterways.
“Saudi Arabia has taken some incremental steps in recent years to try to cooperate with China in viable areas related to security and defense, so it is difficult to imagine such a relationship,” Ayham Kamel, head of the Middle East and North Africa team at Eurasia Group, said in a research note. There will be no further impetus from Xi Jinping’s visit.”
The outside world will pay close attention to and interpret Xi Jinping’s trip to Saudi Arabia to understand how Saudi Arabia under the leadership of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Mohammed bin Salman) will implement a more maverick foreign policy; Personal vendettas have led to heightened tensions between the two countries.
Xi will meet the Saudi crown prince and the crown prince’s aging father, King Salman, on Thursday before attending a major summit of Gulf and Arab leaders. The crown prince, 37, is in charge of running the kingdom’s day-to-day affairs. Saudi state media said the summit would “discuss how to strengthen cooperation in all fields and discuss prospects for economic and development cooperation”.
The visit comes amid an eventful week in global energy markets, in which Western countries imposed price caps and partial embargoes on Russian oil exports. The Saudis will be keen to learn about Xi Jinping’s plan to deal with the new crown epidemic in China. In China, the policy of dynamic zeroing has sparked rare protests and dampened global energy demand.
When Xi visited the Middle East four years ago, he pledged $23 billion in loans and aid to Arab countries and said he wanted China to be the guardian of peace and stability in the Middle East.
The trip will inevitably draw comparisons to U.S. President Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia in July. Biden met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman for the first time in Saudi Arabia, despite domestic criticism of Saudi Arabia over human rights issues. Biden told some Arab leaders at the time that the United States would not leave a vacuum in the region for China, Russia or Iran to fill, but his trip produced few concrete results. There will be more Arab leaders meeting with Xi Jinping this time.
People familiar with preparations for the trip said Mr. Xi would be greeted more warmly than he was received by then-President Donald J. Trump in 2017.
Biden has expressed a preference for democracies, while Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia will also highlight the growing cultural ties between China and Saudi Arabia, as well as the shared values of the two authoritarian regimes, both of which have low tolerance for public criticism , and carefully manage the domestic economy. Saudi Arabia, home to many of Islam’s holy sites, has publicly defended China’s policies in the western Xinjiang region, justified China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims and supported China’s stance on Taiwan. Domestically, Saudi Arabia is including Chinese in the country’s school curriculum.
Xi won a third term in October, cementing his status as China’s leader, but has faced China’s biggest protests in years for the past two weeks, so until his departure, whether the trip will be Success is still in doubt. Xi has rarely traveled abroad since the outbreak, and he has only traveled abroad twice so far in 2020, including last month when he met with Biden at the G20 summit.
In announcing Xi’s visit on Tuesday, Saudi Arabia said Xi and Crown Prince Mohammed would sign a strategic partnership document and at least 20 preliminary agreements worth more than $29 billion, without giving specifics.
Negotiations to denominate some oil sales in yuan are expected to make significant headway. The Wall Street Journal has reported that China and Saudi Arabia have accelerated such talks this year. Other deals are likely to focus on refining, advanced technology and manufacturing, with China looking to lock in future energy supplies to fuel domestic growth, and Saudi Arabia planning new industries beyond oil.
Any progress in cooperation between China and Saudi Arabia in the fields of telecommunications and weapons will be closely scrutinized by the United States. The United States has reminded its partners in the Middle East to pay attention to the cooperation between China and Saudi Arabia, believing that such cooperation may eventually threaten the national security interests of the United States. Thus endangering the US military presence in the Middle East countries.
Colin Kahl, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, told regional security officials at a conference in Bahrain last month: “Eventually it will get to a point where when you have an extremely deep relationship with a country like China, then Our ability to cooperate would be limited naturally, not for punitive reasons, but because it would pose a security risk to our forces and systems deployed in the Middle East.”
“Sometimes people have a feeling that when you’re working with China, there are no strings attached, but I think a lot of the time it’s just strings that are hard to spot,” Kahl said.
U.S. patience with partners dealing with China suffered a major setback last year when the Biden administration learned that China was secretly building a facility that U.S. intelligence agencies suspect has military uses at a port in the United Arab Emirates, which is also home to U.S. troops . After several rounds of talks and a visit by U.S. officials, construction was halted.
Chinese technology companies such as Huawei Technologies Co., as well as construction firms, have also won numerous contracts in Saudi Arabia to help build new smart cities from scratch, upgrade the country’s telecommunications infrastructure and create an artificial intelligence industry.
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