China and Arab States hold conference
The building of a China-Arab community with a shared future
Since the 1990s, China has been developing mutually beneficial economic and cultural relations with Arab countries, a process that has intensified in the last ten years. China offers to the oil-rich Arab countries a large market for their oil exports. At the same time, China has the economic capacity and the political will to support the diversification and modernization of Arab economies, which is increasingly understood by Arab governments as necessary for sustained economic growth and political stability.
In accordance with these tendencies, the first China-Arab States Summit and the first China-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit were held in Saudi Arabia on December 9, 2022. See my previous commentary on the events.
China will host the second China-Arab States Summit in 2026.
“China and the Arab world: The land of the Prophet embraces the wisdom of the East,” December 13, 2022
The Tenth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum was held in Beijing on May 30, 2024. The Conference was co-chaired by Wang Yi, China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and by Mohamed Salem Ould Merzouk, Mauritania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. Representatives of the twenty-two member countries of the League of Arab States participated in the Conference, which has met biannually since it was launched in 2004. The 2024 Conference included the participation of heads of state of Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates, who combined their participation in the ministerial level conference with state visits to China.
The Conference adopted the Beijing Declaration, which reviews progress in implementing the proposals of the first China-Arab States Summit of 2022. It reaffirms China-Arab cooperation with respect to pragmatic issues, such as global governance, terrorism, artificial intelligence, and climate change. It reaffirms a commitment to common economic development through cooperation and to building a China-Arab community with a shared future. And it reiterates commitment to a dialogue among civilizations.
The Conference also adopted a plan of execution for 2024-2026. The plan included cooperation in trade, investment, finance, infrastructure development, environmental protection, education, and health, involving projects of bilateral and multilateral cooperation.
The Conference also issued a joint statement by China and the Arab states with respect to the prolonged conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The statement calls for a ceasefire, and it expresses opposition to the forced displacement of the Palestinian people. It supports the full membership of Palestine in the United Nations, and it advocates the earliest possible resolution of the conflict based on the two-State solution.
Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the Conference on May 30. He observed that friendship between the Chinese and Arab peoples is rooted in the relations of the ancient Silk Road, their common joint struggles for national liberation during the twentieth century, and their current win-win cooperation seeking national development. He characterized the 2022 China-Arab States Summit in Saudi Arabia as constituting an agreement to “build a China-Arab community with a shared future.” He committed to “continued leapfrog growth in China-Arab relations,” as “both China and the Arab states strive to accomplish their historical missions of national rejuvenation and faster national development.”
Xi declared that China will work with Arab countries to attain a relation that is a model for the path to world peace and stability, cooperating in such areas as oil, gas, commerce, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and energy. “China will work with the Arab side in the spirit of inclusiveness and mutual learning to make our relations a paradigm of harmonious coexistence between civilizations.” China will work with the Arab countries to set an example of South-South cooperation.
The Chinese president put forth five “cooperative frameworks” as the foundation for the building of a China-Arab community with a shared future. First, cooperation in the innovative development of new advances in health, green energy, modern agriculture, space technology, and information technology. “We will enhance cooperation on AI to make it empower the real economy and to promote a broad-based global governance system on AI.”
Secondly, cooperation in investment and finance. China wants to expand cooperation among the financial institutions of China and the Arab countries. China supports a more rapid implementation of special loans and credit for industrialization in the Middle East.
Thirdly, cooperation in energy, including enhanced cooperation in oil and gas as well as new energy research and development. China supports the participation of Chinese energy companies in renewable energy projects in Arab states.
Fourth, cooperation in expanding mutually beneficial commerce and trade, including the development of a more balanced trade that involves the importation of non-energy products from the Arab countries, especially agricultural products.
Fifth, cooperation in people-to-people exchanges, including cultural tourism, youth development forums, and alliances between universities and think tanks. China plans to invite 200 leaders of Arab political parties to visit China every year, and China will work with the Arab countries to attain ten million two-way visits of tourists in the next five years.
With respect to the conflict in Gaza, the Chinese President declared that China supports unwavering commitment to the two-state solution, involving the establishment of an independent State of Palestine with full sovereignty, based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. Accordingly, China supports Palestine’s full membership in the United Nations. In addition, Xi stressed the need for a broad-based, authoritative and effective international peace conference. China will send RMB500 million yuan for humanitarian assistance in Gaza for support of post-conflict reconstruction, and China will donate US$3 million to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refuges in support of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
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The Arab turn to diversification, modernization and cooperation with China
In the post-World War II era, the Arab states, with their weak but oil-rich economies, turned to subordination to the United States and the Western powers, depositing their oil revenues in Northern banks. As it happened, this created a problem of excess liquidity in the major banks of the world economy, which was resolved by offering loans with flexible interest rates to Third World states, often via corrupt means of one form or another. Subsequently, the international finance agencies used Third World debt as a weapon to impose neoliberal economic policies, sacrificing the needs of the world’s poor to increase the profits of the international corporations and to establish financial speculation as an ongoing long-term tendency, rather than a periodic cycle. Weakened Third World states were less able than ever to protect national interests and the needs of the people. The inherent conflict of interests between North and South was deepened, and accommodationist states of the South were increasingly vulnerable to political instability. The discovery and commercialization of Middle Eastern oil, therefore, had profoundly negative consequences for the peoples of the South, and therefore the world.
But the oversight would not endure. Since the 1950s, the geopolitical consciousness of Third World leaders and intellectuals has been growing, and the fundamentals increasingly have been grasped. (1) Anti-imperialist people’s movements in the nations of the South must delegitimate accommodationist political parties and use politically intelligent strategies to arrive to political power. (2) Once in power, people’s movements must exercise state power at their disposal to mobilize all sectors—public, private, and people’s—to keep imperialist interests at bay, take control of the natural resources of the nation, diversify national economies, direct resources toward diversification and productivity, and attend to the basic human needs of the people. These fundamentals are widely understood today throughout the regions of the global South and East.
The phenomenon of evolving and maturing Third World consciousness has been visible for all the world to see, but it has been ignored by the media and the universities of the West, except for occasional superficial and ethnocentric commentary. Let us note the basics of the story. The process was initiated by the Bandung Conference in 1955, attended by leaders of newly independent Asian and African states. It took organizational form in 1961, when the Non-Aligned Movement was formed as an organization of states dedicated to the construction of a world order in which their voices would be heard and their sovereignty would be respected, not merely as a formal declaration in the UN Charter, but in real political practice. The Non-Aligned Movement was able to attain passage by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 of a (non-binding) declaration calling for a New International Economic Order that would respect the rights of all nations to sovereignty, to non-interference in their internal affairs, to control over their natural resources, and to be subjects in their economic development.
The declaration was ignored by the world powers, in spite of its wisdom. Facing the increasing symptoms of world-systemic crisis, the sources of which they did not understand, the elites who have been the de facto rulers of the world-system took a short-sighted unenlightened turn. In the 1980s, they launched multifaceted war against the weak states and impoverished peoples of the earth, unwittingly or indifferently deepening the structural contradictions of the world-system.
The practical consequences of the unenlightened turn were experienced by the marginalized peoples of the earth, whose rebellious protests (beginning in the late 1990s) provided the foundation for a renewal of the Third World project that had been proclaimed from the 1950s through the 1970s. The renewal is evident in the declarations of the Non-Aligned Movement from 2006 to the present, in the delegitimation of traditional political parties in Latin America, in the emergence of regional associations in all regions of the planet, in the development of South-South cooperation in practice, and in the constant universal proclamations in support of Cuba and Palestine.
And what of China? China’s people’s revolution has taken the giant nation with an ancient civilization on a parallel road. In the historic process of Third World formulation, decline, and renewal, China has been tangentially present, participating in its own way in the process of universal demand and transformation, in the context of its own discovery of its mission and destiny. China today plays a leading role in the construction of an alternative world order based not on bullying by competing imperialisms but based in mutual respect, mutually beneficial trade and cooperation, as the best foundation for world peace and prosperity. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has been forming strategic partnerships with the leading nations of the renewed Third World project.
For its part, the Arab world has been present in the Third World project from the beginning. Most notably, Nasser was among the founders of the Bandung spirit and the Non-Aligned Movement; and Gaddafi forged a creative economically successful and politically stable synthesis of secular Arab nationalism and the principles of Islam. But most Arab countries—with weak economies, oil wealth, and limited social consciousness among the elite and the peoples—opted for accommodation to the interests of the West. However, unfolding global tendencies were undermining the turn to accommodation, including the increasingly obvious economic, political, and moral decline of the West, and the increasingly evident contradictions of the neocolonial world-system. In the Arab world, a new generation of leaders is emerging that discerns the imperative need for Arab cooperative participation in the process of worldwide construction of an alternative post-imperialist world order.
Thus, the cooperation between China and the Arab world during the last ten years is fully consistent with global tendencies of the last half century.
The leaders and intellectuals of the West, including those of the Left, do not understand that the nations of the West, with their advanced economies, must participate in the creation of a post-neocolonial and post-imperialist international economic order based on cooperation, mutually beneficial trade, and mutual respect; even though the advances of their economies are based in colonialism and imperialism. The peoples of the South and East, with hope for the future of humanity, convoke a new generation of leaders with awakened consciousness in the North.
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