Chinese Premier Li Qiang touted the “comprehensive strategic partnership” between China and Iran on the sidelines of a diplomatic summit, despite Iran’s patronage of the Hamas terrorists who sparked a devastating conflict with Israel.
“China is ready to work with Iran to … enrich the connotation of the China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership and bring more benefits to the two peoples,” Li told Iranian Vice President Mohammad Mokhber during a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Kyrgyzstan.
Li offered that salute in the first known public meeting between senior officials of the two regimes, according to the South China Morning Post. Their encounter, which ran parallel to Russia’s decision to host Hamas and a different senior Iranian official for meetings in Moscow, demonstrated Beijing’s apparent attempt to use Israel’s war with Hamas as an opportunity to expand ties with Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East — from Iran to U.S. allies such as the Gulf Arab states.
“The catastrophic fallout of the abrupt escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli situation recently is heart-wrenching,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Thursday, after a meeting of the China-Arab Civilization Dialogue in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday. “China’s policy and position on the Palestinian question was highly recognized by the Arab delegates at the dialogue. Exchanges between civilizations are an important means enabling human beings to rise above differences and achieve harmonious coexistence.”
That rhetoric is emblematic of Beijing’s attempt to find diplomatic messages that capitalize on disagreements within the U.S. alliance network, according to a former senior Pentagon official.
“We are seeing some pushback from Arab countries on the strong support the United States has provided to Israel,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Bonny Lin told the Washington Examiner. “So China is trying to capitalize on that by … using this as an opportunity to say that China can work with the Arab world.”
Iran has broadened its relationship with both China and Russia in recent years, as the trio have mutually reinforcing interests in undermining the U.S. alliance network in their respective regions. Iran, a major patron of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, also has backed the Houthis in a war against a Saudi Arabian-led coalition. Chinese diplomats have worked to elide those differences, perhaps most notably by brokering a diplomatic rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh, and have continued in that vein in their overtures to the Muslim societies of the region.
“China will continue to stand on the side of international fairness and justice, on the side of international law, and on the side of the legitimate aspirations of the Arab and Islamic world,” Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun told the United Nations Security Council this week.
That rhetoric is emblematic of Beijing’s attempt to find diplomatic messages that capitalize on disagreements within the U.S. alliance network, according to a former senior Pentagon official.
“We are seeing some pushback from Arab countries on the strong support the United States has provided to Israel,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Bonny Lin told the Washington Examiner. “So China is trying to capitalize on that by … using this as an opportunity to say that China can work with the Arab world.”
Iran has broadened its relationship with both China and Russia in recent years, as the trio have mutually reinforcing interests in undermining the U.S. alliance network in their respective regions. Iran, a major patron of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, also has backed the Houthis in a war against a Saudi Arabian-led coalition. Chinese diplomats have worked to elide those differences, perhaps most notably by brokering a diplomatic rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh, and have continued in that vein in their overtures to the Muslim societies of the region.
“China will continue to stand on the side of international fairness and justice, on the side of international law, and on the side of the legitimate aspirations of the Arab and Islamic world,” Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun told the United Nations Security Council this week.
Zhang’s colleagues in Beijing offered the latest uproar as a justification of Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s “Global Civilization Initiative,” an ambiguous framework that U.S. analysts tend to regard as an attempt to undermine the international laws and norms that Beijing deems advantageous to the United States.
“Enhancing inter-civilization dialogue can be an effective remedy to fix the problem of confrontation and conflict,” said Mao. “China stands ready to work with Arab countries to further unlock the power of civilizations and jointly act on the GCI to inject more stability into a world of change and instability and contribute more to the shared response to global challenges.”
The policy implications of the Global Civilization Initiative remain unclear. “We still need to wait to see what exactly it is,” said Lin, the CSIS expert. “Right now, it’s a lot of rhetoric. But aside from discussions about exchanges — cultural exchanges and whatnot — it’s still in the formation, so we’ll need to really see how that plays out.”
If China has tried to strike a technically-neutral pose in the conflict, the regime’s aversion to condemning Hamas has drawn public rebukes from Israel. Mao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, demurred when asked if China would be willing to meet with Hamas.
“Thank you for your interest in China’s efforts to actively communicate with other parties and promote peace talks,” she said. “You are right in saying that China is in communication with parties concerned. We also call on relevant parties of the international community to work together for an early ceasefire and avert further deterioration of the situation. China will continue to make unremitting effort to this end.”
China has previously regarded Israel as a target for investment in port infrastructure and high-end technology.
“The Chinese were looking at Israel as potential [way] to invest in cloud computing companies there, to get access to Israeli technology — a lot of tech transfer concerns, cyber concerns, and what it would mean for U.S. interests as far as the vulnerabilities of a backdoor through Israel to the United States as well,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior adviser Richard Goldberg, the White House National Security Council’s director for countering Iran’s nuclear program in 2019 and 2020, told the Washington Examiner. “All of that is off the table now if China is lining up with Iran.”
Li, the Chinese premier, signaled that Beijing will help Iran resist U.S. sanctions.
“China will continue to firmly support Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national dignity, and will strongly oppose any external forces interfering in Iran’s internal affairs,” he said, per Xinhua, a Chinese state media outlet.
