Saudi Finance Minister to Beijing
Between Xi’s trip to Europe, Putin’s trip to Beijing, the death of Iranian President Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and others onboard the helicopter, and the ICC arrest warrants for Israel and Hamas it’s been a big week for watching China and a big week for watching the Middle East. So far, however, it’s been relatively quiet on China-MENA.
The big story is a trip to Beijing for Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan with a delegation that included a lot of officials from the Saudi central bank and departments covering development and infrastructure. In addition to meeting with his Chinese counterpart Lan Fuan, Al Jadaan also met Vice Premier He Lifeng. There hasn’t been much reporting on outcomes yet; I imagine tomorrow there will be stories about MoUs.
The meeting with Lan was under the framework of the Finance Subcommittee of the High-Level China-Saudi Joint Committee (HLJC). The HLJC was established during the 2016 state visit from Xi Jinping to Riyadh, when they announced the comprehensive strategic partnership. The HLJC is the steering mechanism for the partnership, and it meets semi-regularly, co-chaired by China’s Vice Premier and Saudi’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. It’s an interesting diplomatic mechanism that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s held there are typically tens of billions worth of MoUs and contracts signed. I wrote about it a bit in this report I published for Atlantic Council in 2020 to mark the 30th anniversary of China-Saudi diplomatic relations. Essentially, when you read a story about G2G meetings between China and KSA, the HLJC is the framework, and explains the meeting with He Lifeng - as VP he’s China’s point man on Saudi.
At the December 2022 China-Saudi summit in Riyadh one of the outcomes was to have a head of state summit every two years, so that should happen sometime this year. Since the last one was in Saudi I expect this year’s will be in Beijing, perhaps during the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum I wrote about last week.
In any case, the China-Saudi bilateral is really interesting and a lot more complex that it usually appears to be with some not insignifcant points of frictition that get papered over when all the stories are about tens of billions of dollars worth of deals. I’ll come back to it as we get closer to the CASCF if it looks like there is going to be an interesting Saudi angle.