Under the ambitious and aggressive leadership of President Xi Jinping, China has for years given the world reason to feel uneasy. Xi’s regime uses every possible device to track the lives of citizens and control them — peasants can’t leave their villages without permission, for instance.
Though a third of all Chinese live in poverty, the government celebrates the industrial progress of recent years for which it of course takes all credit. As a result, bureaucrats have developed a new and probably expensive strategy, the extension of Chinese influence across two oceans to the Middle East. It seems to them a place where China can flourish, and demonstrate its now proven industrial ability.
At a meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Beijing, Chinese officials pledged US$23 billion in loans and development aid to the region. China and Saudi Arabia have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore US$65 billion in joint ventures, a contract with a big number but a vague future. Xi has visited Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt, to express personally China’s hopes for the Middle East.
We might imagine that Islamic nations in the Middle East would be offended by China’s treatment of the Islamic Uyghurs in China’s western province. So offended, in fact, that they might refuse China’s invitations to engage in joint projects. For years, Beijing has pursued the goal of “pacifying” its Uyghur Muslim minority, whom Chinese bureaucrats see as dangerously prone to radicalization; it takes a communist to spot a dangerous radical.
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