Coverage of Egyptian FM Abdelatty's visit to Beijing, analysis on China-Syria

There’s a lot of ground to cover today - with final exams, grading, and lots of people passing through Abu Dhabi last week I’m a bit behind, so today I’m going to share some links to two big stories - Egyptian FM Badr Abdelatty’s visit to Beijing and the ongoing situation in Syria - and then try to make sense of all the other stories that happened over the past four days in tomorrow’s post.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty was in Beijing last week. I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot lately in pointing out the surge in China-Egypt engagement. I think it’s a big development and I’m mapping out a longer piece about it that I hope to send out later this week. President Al-Sisi was in Beijing in May, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly was there in September, and now the FM was in town to meet with Wang Yi. I’m looking at data on official visits and it’s already interesting just at the presidential level. Al-Sisi has been to China eight times since taking power in 2014. Former President Mubarak went six times in total between 1981 and 2011. It’s pretty clear that leaders in Egypt see China differently, and it’s probably not a coincidence that this surge has happened in conjunction with the BRI (2013), the announcement of the 1+2+3 cooperation framework (2014) and the release of the Arab policy paper (2016). At a time when Al-Sisi and his government were not inclined to trust the Western countries that dropped Mubarak and then shunned him after the 2013 coup that put him in power, China was coming into the Middle East in a big way. Few other countries offer Egypt what China seems willing to, so it makes sense to see this expansion of relations between the two.

Beyond the bilateral relationship, the meeting involved a lot of talk about Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. One of Wang Yi’s talking points was the need to build a "new sustainable Middle East security framework" which sounds like something we’ll be hearing more about soon. BRICS+ was on the agenda, and in this article from Xinhua we see the cooperation priorities that are being highlighted.