What to Make of China’s Moves in the Middle East

Beijing has long attempted, without real success, to take part in international efforts meant to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. For example, in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, China hosted Israelis and Palestinians for talks. The gatherings did not generate agreements between the parties, but they did garner press attention for China. The recent round of talks in Beijing between 14 Palestinian factions, most prominently Fatah and Hamas, has also garnered press for China. While the Palestinians do not seem to treat the ensuing “Beijing declaration” as having made a tangible difference, Beijing claims that the declaration puts an end to divisions and bitter rivalry.

Compelling Fatah to work with Hamas, Beijing is ignoring the historic divergence between the two, with the former agreeing to recognize the State of Israel while Hamas continues to call for Israel’s destruction. Beijing is also ignoring its allies in the Middle East who have made it clear that they want to see an end to Hamas. This is an example of what the author Edward Luttwak termed “great state autism” whereby leaders of large, powerful states fail to maintain the constant situational awareness of foreign environments that are natural for regional small countries and necessary for accurate assessments at any given time. Such disconnect results in Beijing’s promotion of the “Beijing declaration” as another mediation success comparable to the Saudi-Iran rapprochement. In fact, as I was told in private meetings with Chinese officials in June, China was more of a facilitator than a mediator since the deal was mainly complete when it was brought to China. Moreover, China’s role in the Saudi-Iran deal seems to have insufficiently assuaged Saudi Arabia’s long-term security concerns regarding Iran, as Riyadh continues to entertain normalization with Israel as part of a larger deal for a security alliance with the U.S. This causes one to wonder at the comparison between the Saudi-Iran deal and the Beijing declaration.

China’s increasingly public focus on the Middle East is in line with its global interests. China sees the Middle East not only as a key arena in its competition with the U.S. but as a testing ground for its new initiatives (the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative (GSI), and Global Civilization Initiative) and its stated plans to reshape global governance. This includes promoting the GSI as the new security architecture for the region. These interests are supported by China’s investments; it has been the largest investor in the Middle East since 2016. When its Belt and Road investments decreased worldwide in 2018, they grew in the Middle East.

China’s efforts on behalf of the Palestinians are also aimed at burnishing its image as the self-declared leader of the Global South. China’s bid for leadership is based on the claim (among others) that it “puts people first.” There appears to be a growing awareness in Beijing of pressure to act like the great power it is perceived and wishes to be—putting people first is a move beyond rhetorical support to taking action on behalf of the Palestinians. China’s unprecedentedly harsh stance against Israel, responding to the barbaric October 7 massacre of Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Bedouin Israelis by calling for a two-state solution and refraining from identifying Hamas as a terror organization, has made it difficult for China to act as a mediator vis-a-vis Israel. Intra-Palestinian unity offers a platform for Palestinian “action” that will likely be well received by the Global South.

Going forward, Beijing will continue to work toward bringing the Middle East into its sphere of influence, with all this implies. Its stance regarding Israel and the Palestinians will adjust according to what best supports this longer-term goal.

Eight days before the assassination of Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, China hosted six representatives from the militant group, its archrival Fatah, and 12 other Palestinian groups. The two-day gathering established the “Beijing Declaration,” a vague roadmap to end the 17-year Palestinian split between Hamas and Fatah.

The effort, which followed successive meetings for Chinese diplomats in Doha, Ramallah, and Beijing earlier in the year, underscores China’s growing ambition and confidence in projecting power and wading into Middle East conflicts. The milestone Saudi-Iran agreement that the People’s Republic brokered in March 2023 strengthened the view of how far China diplomacy has come in the region, guided by its talk-to-everyone, friends-with-all approach.

This approach, however, is still nascent, and its efficacy is being tested by the stubborn dynamics of these conflicts. On the Saudi-Iran front, full normalization has not materialized nearly a year and half after the agreement. On the Palestinian front, Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and the establishment of a new interim Palestinian government are very unlikely to happen before the end of the war.

Still, China seems pragmatic enough to realize its own limitations in shaping regional political and security dynamics.

In the intra-Palestinian talks, particularly, it’s an uphill battle for China’s diplomacy given its little to no leverage inside Gaza, lukewarm ties with the Palestinian Authority, worsening relations with Israel, and the events of the war that are undermining the Hamas external political wing.

Throughout its diplomatic engagement with Hamas, China has primarily relied on channels with the group’s offices in Doha. While Beijing has not designated Hamas as a terrorist organization or condemned it by name after the October 7 attacks, its traditional partner among the Palestinians has been the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). This was especially the case under Yasser Arafat, who visited China 14 times from 1964 up until his death in 2004, leveraging Beijing’s early recognition of the PLO in 1965, the first non-Arab nation to do so.

Three years after Arafat’s death, a new, divided Palestinian reality emerged as Hamas took control of Gaza and ousted Fatah. The change has led China to broaden its outreach to Hamas as an integral part of Palestinian politics. Today, even as Israel continues to inflict a heavy toll on the group’s leadership and military infrastructure in Gaza, Beijing seems to be operating under the assumption that the group’s influence will endure after the war is over.

This expectation led to more intensified engagement between Hamas and China over the past six months.

China’s March meeting with Haniyeh in Doha was followed by a Hamas and Fatah visit to Beijing in April. Hamas’ delegation was led by the deputy head of its political bureau, Moussa Abu Marzouk, along with senior officials Khalil al-Hayya and Hossam Badran. Marzouk returned in July and signed the Beijing Declaration.

In the aftermath of Haniyeh’s killing, however, the power dynamics within Hamas shifted. Yahya Sinwar, a hardline figure, and the mastermind of the October 7 attack, was named on August 6 as the new leader of the political wing of Hamas. The change weakens the external wing of Hamas and undermines efforts by Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. to reach a ceasefire. By extension, it complicates China’s efforts in expanding its influence and reconciling the Hamas-Fatah divide.

Nevertheless, for China, elevating its role on the Palestinian arena is a win-win in the Arab world. It reinforces a pro-Palestinian narrative that is well-received in the Global South and shows it in contrast with the United States, without necessarily aiming to replace Washington as a security guarantor in the region. Arab Barometer polling conducted in 2023-2024 in five countries showed China’s favorability on the rise, while the U.S. image saw a sharp decline amid Washington’s political and military support for Israel since October 7.

Securing a seat at the table is another objective for China in anticipation of the day-after talks in Gaza. Toward that end, China will lean on its strong relations with regional middle powers, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Iran, even as its current efforts falter.

What does Beijing expect to get out of the intra-Palestinian peace talks? I think hosting the talks was the primary accomplishment for China: it got a seat at the table. The meeting sent a message that Beijing is a serious diplomatic actor in the Middle East and did something the U.S. cannot—get all the Palestinian groups in a room together. This builds on last year’s rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran that was also hosted in Beijing. In both cases, the ability to bring rivals together is meant to show the Middle East that China is more than an economic actor in the region—it is willing to wade into the big issues. The talks also build momentum for China’s global initiatives—the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative—demonstrating to the Global South that there can be tangible outcomes from working with China. In the process, Beijing gets to position itself as a credible alternative to the West and the U.S.

All of this is about messaging, however. I don’t think we can expect too much from China in terms of implementation. Despite its increasing Middle East presence, China is not a significant political or diplomatic actor yet, and even if by some miracle it is able to convince the Palestinian factions to get past decades of distrust, competing agendas, and different visions of what they want for a Palestinian state, it would still have to convince Israel to get on board. Last year, China said it wanted to mediate on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but its response to the October 7 attack and everything that has happened since has done tremendous damage to the Israel-China relationship. So I think China has a limited capacity to play a meaningful role in what comes next.

How does China’s support for Iran factor into its strategies for the Arab world? It certainly complicates it. China’s interests in the Middle East are primarily economic, and the countries it has the deepest relations with, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, see Iran as a threat. In material terms, there’s no comparison; in energy, trade, investment, and contracting China gets a lot more from the Arab side of the Persian Gulf than it does from Iran. And Iran’s regional policy and its support for revisionist nonstate actors like the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah destabilize the Middle East in a way that undermines China’s economic interests. We have seen this explicitly with the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. In the wake of the December 2022 summit in Riyadh, Arab leaders had hoped that increased engagement with China would bring Beijing closer to their preferences for regional stability, and with that some expected that Beijing would use its perceived influence with the Iranians to stop the Houthi attacks. That it failed to do so underscored the limits of what China is able to do in the political or diplomatic space in the Middle East, and disappointed regional governments that expected more of Beijing. So its relationship with Iran makes for a more challenging regional environment.

Any appraisal of the recent “Beijing Declaration” should take into account local dynamics when considering its tangible impact. (I made the same argument about the Saudi-Iranian detente agreement that Beijing brokered.) The declaration follows in the footsteps of many other preceding agreements between Palestinian groups that had been discussed or concluded over the past two decades (and there have been many, in Algiers, in Cairo, in Doha, etc.). Since 2006, intra-Palestinian reconciliation has been elusive, in large part because there are simply irreconcilable views among the different factions—primarily Fatah and Hamas—regarding power-sharing arrangements. This fundamental factor has not changed, and as one astute observer, Hamzé Attar, noted skeptically, “he who swore and broke his oath before the walls of the Kaaba will swear and break his oath before the Great Wall of China.” He is alluding here to another ill-fated agreement, that brokered in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 2007.

So why would China pursue such a seemingly futile endeavor? As Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Lin Jian indicated, the Beijing Declaration showcases a high degree of alignment with the majority of Arab and Muslim states in terms of establishing how peace should be brokered. This emphasis could be read as part of China’s effort to harness Palestine’s power to inspire indignation and solidarity (amongst Arab countries and elsewhere) in Beijing’s propaganda struggle with the United States. Looking more closely into what is ascribed to the declaration, however, what is striking is how uncreatively adherent the Chinese official stance has been to a framework/roadmap that originates with the American-led Oslo process of the 1990s and the importance it places on a negotiated two-state solution that assumes parity between the two sides. (This holds equally true for China’s past multi-pointed proposals as well.) Taking this into account alongside China’s own limited capacity and appetite to cultivate real leverage in regional conflicts, it is safe to say that the declaration is more of an exercise in optics involving picking low-hanging fruit rather than an actual attempt at asserting a new diplomatic role for China in the Middle East.

This brings me to a more central point: there is practically little outside actors like China can do to cultivate peace so long as the United States and its Western allies continue to abide by a myopic and extremist approach when it comes to Israel. Consider the following: Gaza’s infrastructure has been devastated with a death toll that has likely exceeded the 40,000 mark; and a system of apartheid—acknowledged by UN experts, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and well reputed Israeli peace and rights organizations like B’tselem and Adalah—exists “between the river and the sea” (with a re-doubling of annexation efforts and violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank). All of these are unequivocal war crimes—including many preceding the Hamas massacres in October 2023—taking place under a defiant right-wing Israeli government that has openly disavowed the two-state solution and is actively seeking to escalate and drag the region into an all-out war.

In any other context, this would have led to ample condemnation and sanctions to restrain and punish such behavior. This was certainly (and rightly) the case with Russia as a consequence of its invasion of Ukraine. Yet such responses are not only wholly absent from countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but all of them are in fact actively arming and diplomatically/legally shielding Israel from international censure. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is being considered for an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor for crimes against humanity—was met with a standing ovation by the U.S. Congress.

In this conflict, there is a very real asymmetry of power between a nuclear-armed and technologically advanced state, backed by a global superpower and its collection of allies, and a dispossessed and fragmented people subject to a violent settler-colonial project. Ultimately, unless real pressure is brought to bear upon Israel, compelling a change in its calculus to end the occupation and cease its supremacist and maximalist claims, there will be no peace, but repeated cycles of bloodshed and repression. The key variable is the United States, either by imposing pressure or withdrawing its unequivocal backing. This reality is what makes Chinese attempts at peacemaking, as embodied by the Beijing declaration, still-born and perhaps unserious from the very start. It explains, more pertinently, why such efforts might be viewed in Beijing and elsewhere as useful resources in China’s discursive propaganda war: Palestine brings into sharp relief the hypocrisy of Western states that decry the erosion of international laws and institutions, not to mention the universal principles of dignity and equality, while tirelessly dismantling them in turn.

Viewed from the West, it is easy to ascribe Chinese enthusiasm for the so-called “Beijing Declaration” between Hamas and Fatah to simple naivete. After all, while these two Palestinian factions have long paid lip service to the idea of Palestinian unity, in reality they are bitter enemies who espouse mutually exclusive approaches to the achievement of Palestinian political aspirations. The war in Gaza and accompanying tension and violence in the West Bank has perhaps led the two factions into something of a truce, but it has done nothing to ease the underlying opposition between them—indeed, Fatah officials bitterly complain that the egotism and extremism of Hamas leaders has brought ruin upon Palestinians.

Yet it would be a mistake to view Palestinian reconciliation as Beijing’s true aim. There are three motivations for Beijing’s sudden emphasis on the war in Gaza and on Palestinian politics. Two are longstanding. First, China has long sought to position itself as the champion and leader of the so-called “Global South.” Beijing has traveled a great distance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, from actively supporting Palestinian factions during the Cold War, to cultivating close security and economic relations with Israel from the 1980s to 2010s, yet it has never totally abandoned the former impulse. Second, as it has grown in global prominence, China has sought to make a show of diplomatic activity on major diplomatic issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to underscore its own importance. To that end, Beijing has dispatched envoys to the region and hosted delegations from it, and has even released multiple self-styled plans for Israeli-Palestinian peace. While the plans largely consisted of vague invocations of conventional diplomatic wisdom, it was their promulgation rather than their content that was significant.

However, a third, newer, and more troubling motivation is also apparent in Beijing’s actions since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Chinese officials and analysts have quickly pivoted from a relatively pro-Israel footing to indulging not just criticisms of Israeli government policy but permitting the spread of antisemitism in Chinese social and broadcast media. This appears to reflect not a newfound concern for Palestinian aspirations, but an effort by Beijing to use conflicts, whether in Ukraine, Gaza, or elsewhere, to rally global public opinion against the United States, even at the cost of sacrificing relationships—like those with both Israel and Ukraine—that it spent decades cultivating.

Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, put it this way: “The Israel-Gaza war will reduce the global political influence of the United States. This is already very obvious, because even its allies have to distance themselves from it on this issue. . . As the US’ strategic relations with other major powers will be undermined, the strategic balance between China and the US will become less favourable to the US.” That Palestinian unity is unrealistic, or that Hamas rule would not serve the stability in the Middle East that China desires, is ultimately beside the point. What matters is that if the United States loses, Beijing—in this view of the world—wins.