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How China’s Communist Party seeks to win friends and influence through Mideast political groups
- Party-to-party diplomacy in Middle East can help China export its governance system and gain support on sensitive matters, observers say
- While socialist groups are among party’s strongest partners, Beijing aims to engage organisations across ideological spectrum, according to experts
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From brokering a deal between rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran to offering to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, China’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East have raised Beijing’s profile as a player in the region.
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These efforts have been at the state level and carried out through the Chinese foreign ministry and state leaders.
But China has also been engaging the region on another level, attempting to promote its own governance model as an alternative to the West by fostering engagement between the Communist Party and political organisations from across the Arab world.
Observers said party-to-party diplomacy could help China achieve stable, long-term influence in Arab countries by engaging with ruling and opposition parties while expanding China’s regional impact, exporting its governance system and building support on controversial matters such as the legitimacy of one-party rule and Beijing’s policies in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
Jesse Marks, a former Fulbright fellow at the Jordan Centre for Strategic Studies, said the Communist Party’s main pursuit in the Middle East was alignment.
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“Party-to-party diplomacy has several objectives, from normalising a one-party system among China’s partners to cultivating and developing ideological political partners in countries of strategic interest,” he said.
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