Weekend Essay: China's Partnership Diplomacy in the Middle East

What do partnership agreements for Bahrain and Tunisia tell us about Beijing's diplomacy in the Middle East?

(This chart needs an update - a lot has changed in 5 years, including the utility of China’s partnership agreements in the Middle East)

At the CASCF in May 2024 China announced that it had established a comprehensive strategic partnership (CSP) with Bahrain and a strategic partnership (SP) with Tunisia. After the Forum ended I wrote that these looked like box-ticking. After talking with some people who pay attention to these things, I’m even more convinced that’s the case. I have a document with China’s diplomatic relations across the Middle East - North Africa / Arab League members, and under the ‘partnership status’ column I’ve been filling it in somewhat steadily in recent years. Right now, the only countries that don’t have a partnership agreement of any type with China are Comoros, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. I suspect Libya will be the next, given the meetings that were held on the sidelines of the CASCF. But in the other cases there is an obvious reason why there is no strategic partnership with China: the bilateral doesn’t have any strategic relevance.

People have told me that I read too much into these partnership agreements, but until recently they were largely reliable indicators of China’s priorities in the Middle East. When I wrote about China’s Gulf partnerships for the Project on Middle East Political Science in 2019, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE were at the CSP level while Iraq, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar had SPs. Bahrain had no partnership. This all made sense to me. The 3 CSPs represented China’s most important regional relationships, the 4 SPs represented countries where China had strong and useful relations, and Bahrain’s lack of a partnership accurately reflected the meager level of trade, investment, contracting, and diplomatic coordination. That Bahrain is now on par with the Saudis, Iranians and Emiratis doesn’t make sense from any objective measure.

There has been a fair bit written about the hierarchy of partnerships in Chinese diplomacy. Sun Degang wrote a chapter for my Routledge Handbook on China-Middle East Relations, and Georg Strüver at GIGA wrote an article that I’ve cited several times, China’s Partnership Diplomacy: International Alignment Based on Interests or Ideology, at The Chinese Journal of International Politics in 2017. Both give excellent overviews of what these partnerships are.

If you want to go straight to the source, former Premier Wen Jiabao explained the CSP with the European Union as:

By ‘comprehensive’, it means that the cooperation should be all-dimensional, wide-ranging and multi-layered. It covers economic, scientific, technological, political and cultural fields, contains both bilateral and multilateral levels, and is conducted by both governments and non-governmental groups. By ‘strategic’, it means that the cooperation should be long-term and stable, bearing on the larger picture of China-EU relations. It transcends the differences in ideology and social system and is not subjected to the impacts of individual events that occur from time to time. By ‘partnership’, it means that the cooperation should be equal-footed, mutually beneficial and win-win. The two sides should base themselves on mutual respect and mutual trust, endeavor to expand converging interests and seek common ground on the major issues while shelving differences on the minor ones.

So there’s a lot of literature on the topic, and I’d be happy to provide a list of relevant work if anyone’s interested. The point is, the partnerships haven’t been empty catch-phrases; there’s a hierarchy and when you see what level of partnership a country has, you get a sense of its relative importance in Beijing. Or at least you used to.

The South China Morning Post offered a guide several years ago that I found useful:

Comprehensive Strategic Partnership: Full pursuit of cooperation and development on regional and international affairs

Strategic Partnership: Co-ordinate more closely on regional and international affairs, including military. 

Comprehensive co-operative partnership: Maintain sound momentum of high-level exchanges, enhanced contacts at various levels, and increased mutual understanding on issues of common interest

Cooperative partnership: Develop cooperation on bilateral issues, based on mutual respect and benefit

Friendly cooperative partnership: Strengthen cooperation on bilateral issues such as trade

The first two are the only relevant ones in the Middle East - North Africa, and there is a innovative comprehensive partnership with Israel, which, I believe, is unique to that bilateral. Basically, at the top level - a CSP - the country serves a much wider range of Chinese interests, is seen as an important regional and international actor, and has deep ties with China. At the next level - a SP - they do a lot in economic terms but not to the same degree.

If you were making a list of MENA countries that would warrant a CSP, it would look a lot like it has since 2018, when the UAE upgraded the SP it signed with China in 2012. Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE and Egypt all make sense as CSPs, either because of the importance of trade, energy, contracting, Islam, geography, or geopolitics. Algeria is less obvious, but I think it’s more of a legacy issue - China supported Algeria in its struggle for independence and that has always been a strong political bond that seems more driven by the Party than the state.

For those who have been dismissive of the importance of CSPs in driving China’s relations in the Middle East, I would point to the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker, which tallies Chinese investments and contracting since 2005. The MENA countries that have provided Chinese firms with the most contracting revenue since then, in order, are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Algeria, Iran, and Egypt. I’m writing about this for a book that I hope to wrap up this summer, but the data I’m looking at shows a pretting interesting spike in contracting for China following the establishment of these CSPs with each country, and it shouldn’t really come as a surprise; these partnerships have traditionally resulted in much deeper coordination, more frequent and high level visits, more trade and investment summits, and more diplomatic engagement. All of this ultimately means more contracts, more investment, and more trade.

Which brings us back to the CSP for Bahrain and the SP for Tunisia. Let’s do Tunisia first. If you go to the CGIT, there is a single construction contract for China since 2005, signed in July 2009 and worth $110 million. There is no data available for Chinese investment there, which I take to mean there hasn’t been any since 2005 although that might be wrong. Looking at the IMF’s Direction of Trade Statistics dataset, trade between China and Tunisia was worth $3.948 billion in 2022; Tunisia imported $3.89 billion from China and exported $57 million. This represents less than 1% of Chinese trade with Arab League countries for that year. There is absolutely nothing on the economic side that explains a strategic partnership agreement for Tunisia, and in terms of political engagement there’s not much going on either. For context, Iraq is also a strategic partner, and has been since 2015. Since 2005 Chinese companies have made $20 billion in contracting in Iraq, where China has invested $14.13 billion. Trade in 2022 was worth $52 billion. It’s inexplicable that Iraq and Tunisia are on the same level.

It’s even weirder that Bahrain is the next level up. Like I said before, looking at the data, there’s a reason why Bahrain was the only country in the Gulf without a partnership agreement with China. The depth of political or economic engagment didn’t justify it. In Bahrain there have been two construction contracts for Chinese firms since 2005, both in 2019, for a value of $1.42 billion. Like Tunisia, there is no data for Chinese investment in Bahrain. In 2022 trade was worth $2.5 billion, the most it’s ever been since I started tracking China-GCC relations in 2010. For context here, the UAE has a CSP with China. Contracting since 2005: $34.26 billion. Chinese investment: $8.16 billion. Trade in 2022: $108 billion.

I could give data across all of these levels for all the different partnerships in MENA, but it would be an unweildly substack post and as I mentioned above, it’ll be in the book that should be out this year. Suffice it to say, there is absolutely no way that Bahrain qualifies as a CSP if we use the metrics that we’ve come to use to understand these partnerships. And really, they’ve been pretty reliable metrics, at least at the CSP level. So why did Bahrain get it?

Talking with informed people over the past two weeks I’ve heard some interesting hypotheses. The most frequently voiced one: China wants to poke the US, which has its Fifth Fleet in Manama. I get why Beijing might want to do this, but I absolutely don’t get why Bahrain would. Since the US and Bahrain signed an upgrade to their defence cooperation agreement last fall, there’s very little China can offer Bahrain that it doesn’t get at a much higher level from Washington. Manama wouldn’t do something like this knowing it would jeopardize its much more important relationship with the US, so it’s unlikely that the CSP is going to come with any ‘strategic’ significance. Another idea that got tossed around: the King’s trip to Moscow immediately preceding the CASCF in Beijing indicates a larger diplomatic/strategic role for Bahrain. Linked to this: Bahrain has the rotating presidency of the Arab League, and Beijing wants to work more closely with it on the Palestine issue. At the CASCF China clearly positioned itself against Israel in the Gaza war and China has been calling for a high-profile peace conference since last November. By elevating Bahrain maybe the thinking is it will facilitate a conference that puts China at the center of a diplomatic showcase, much like the Saudi-Iran raprochement from last year.

Another possible explanation: The Investcorp-China Investment Corporation fund announced in April was a sign of deeper economic ties in the works. Bahrain certainly could use more investment, and as described above, it hasn’t seen much from China over the years, so maybe the CSP is seen as a mechanism to draw in more Chinese capital. Which is a nice idea, but really, in a country with such a small territory, population, and market that it’s going to be very hard to pull Chinese capital, even if the Party pushes. This is especially true given the neighbourhood Bahrain has to compete in. The UAE is by far the most attractive FDI market in the Middle East, ranking 8th globally in the 2024 FDI Confidence Index. Saudi, with a trillion dollar GDP, is throwing significant resources behind an effort to bring in more foreign investment as part of its Vision 2030. Bahrain will find it hard to compete as an investment destination.

So what it really comes down to, I think, is that Bahrain didn’t want to be the only Gulf country without a partnership agreement and China wants to say it has partnership agreements with all the Arab League countries. Since King Hamad was making his first trip to Beijing since 2013 he got an elevated partnership. I think the same logic applies to the SP for Tunisia.

The big question for me is, what’s the relevence of these partnerships now? After years of telling people that they were actually useful indicators of a country’s significance to Beijing, I think they may now just be items on a checklist that someone in China’s MOFA has to look at before a phone call or a meeting. For the bigger picture, China looks like a more serious regional actor if it can say that it has strategic partnerships with every country in the Middle East, but what is the actual value of these agreements?

I’d be curious if any of you have insight into them.