ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the historic and current pulses shaping Chinese views and policies toward the Middle East. It will start off by identifying the overt as well as nuanced policy narratives that have carried over from China’s pre-modern and late-Imperial era into the Republican era (1912-1949). Then it will highlight the extent to which these narratives inform the current Middle East policy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The main argument put forward in the following passages is that, whilst historic factors might perhaps help explain elements of tactical continuity in Chinese rhetoric vis-à-vis the Middle East across different periods, Chinese approaches to the region have been primarily re-shaped since the early 1990s by virtue of external factors: the end of the of the Cold War and China’s increasingly acute energy dependency in the twenty-first century. Thus, Chinese rapprochement with the USA in the early 1970s took two more decades to translate into major Middle East policy shifts. Finally, as greater civil unrest and political instability are sweeping across the region at present, the chapter will try to project Chinese strategic choices into the next few decades, with particular focus on the ways and means by which China might wish to re-position itself vis-à-vis Iran, on the one hand, and Israel and Saudi Arabia, on the other.
