Beijing’s Passive-Aggressive Middle East Policy
Summary
China doesn’t aspire to lead the world, much less to establish peace, but only to undermine the U.S.
Will China broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It is a question nobody is asking, because the answer is obvious—not a chance. Yet after Beijing hosted Iran-Saudi talks that led those two rivals to re-establish diplomatic relations in March 2023, some observers wondered if China had supplanted the U.S. as the Middle East’s diplomatic broker. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, China has put such illusions to rest: Beijing seeks not to be a leader, much less to establish peace and stability, but merely to undermine the U.S.
During Mao Zedong’s rule (1949-76), China was a prime sponsor of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. But under Deng Xiaoping, Beijing made a priority of economic growth and identified Israel as a partner that could provide essential military and general technology. The resulting courtship culminated in China naming Israel its “innovative comprehensive partner" in 2017, a distinctive status amid Beijing’s mere strategic partners, including the Palestinian Authority and Iran.
As Beijing realized the benefits of wooing the Mideast’s most dynamic economy, it recognized that supporting the PLO was a liability. While Chinese policy didn’t exactly become pro-Israel, it sought the safe ground of inoffensive diplomatic pablum. China’s 2021 four-point proposal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reads like a ChatGPT summary of every think-tank piece on the subject. Beijing revealed its true goals, however, with its checkbook. In 2021 Beijing announced a donation of only $1 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza—less than many Western businesses gave in the name of corporate social responsibility. That same year, China invested more than $2 billion in Israel.
Yet with the rise of U.S.-China hostilities in recent years, Beijing’s tune on Israel has shifted—and vice versa. After initially touting its economic partnership with China, the Israeli government—prodded in part by Washington—began to install guardrails against Chinese investment in sensitive Israeli infrastructure projects as well as on the transfer of dual-use technology. Trade and investment between the countries has fallen as Jerusalem has come to see Beijing less as a backup great-power patron and more as a security threat.
At the same time, China began to regard Israel as collateral damage in its rivalry with the U.S. During the 2021 Gaza conflict, Beijing used its chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council to blast the U.S. for “standing on the opposite side of mankind’s conscience and morality" by supporting the Jewish state. Israel subsequently joined a statement to the U.N. Human Rights Council that condemned China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority.
China has since doubled down on such actions. Beijing has allowed antisemitism to flourish in Chinese media, especially social media, while declining to condemn Hamas outright or allow information on the Oct. 7 attacks to be freely disseminated within its borders. Meanwhile the Yemen-based Houthis have mounted attacks on commercial shipping through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea—which one might hope Beijing would see as a threat to its economic interests. Yet China’s naval vessels, present in the region as an “antipiracy" task force, sit idle. Its diplomats abstained from a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the strikes, and Beijing has paired its belated calls for the attacks’ cessation with criticism of the U.S.-led response.
A China that aimed to replace the U.S.-led international order with one of its own devising might see the Gaza conflict as an opportunity to act. The Brics bloc of emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could organize a peace effort. China’s navy could escort container ships through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait after, say, a stern phone call from Beijing to Tehran. A China interested in being the region’s go-to diplomatic broker would be cultivating Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which is ideologically at odds with the Biden White House, in hopes that Jerusalem might turn to Beijing as an alternative patron.
But China is doing none of that. Its conduct shows that it is less interested in the success of its own initiatives than in the failure of Washington’s. The real threat to U.S. interests in the Mideast isn’t rising Chinese influence but the erosion of our own. What Beijing wants isn’t a world led by China, but simply one not led by the U.S. Washington shouldn’t accept that.
Mr. Singh is director of the Glazer Program on Great Power Competition and the Middle East at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
