At the invitation of King Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, President Xi Jinping will go to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from December 7 to 10 to attend the first China-Arab States Summit and the China-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit and pay a state visit to Saudi Arabia.

This diplomatic action is President Xi Jinping's second visit to Saudi Arabia in six years since 2016. What's more remarkable is that this is also the largest and highest-level diplomatic action between China and Arab states since the founding of New China.

The first summit will be a new milestone in China-Arab relations

Since the beginning of this year, many new signals of cooperation have been released between China and the Arab states.

In January this year, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain visited China;

In September, China collectively met with Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain foreign ministers, UAE state ministers, and representatives of Qatar and Oman while attending the UN General Assembly in New York;

Not long ago, Qatar just announced that it has reached a 27-year long-term purchase and sales agreement with China for liquefied natural gas, which is the country's "longest contract period in history".

An important manifestation of the "best of two" of this visit is that China will participate in two summits. In addition to the first China-Arab States Summit, there is also the China-Gulf Cooperation Council Summit.

Behind the intensive interaction is China's long-term status as the largest trading partner of the GCC. Last year, China-Sea trade volume increased by 44%. This represents the increasingly in-depth cooperation between China and Arab states. In the first three quarters of this year, the trade volume between China and Arab states reached 319.295 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 35.28%, which is close to the level of the whole year of 2021.

At present, China has become the largest trading partner of Arab countries and the largest foreign investor.

China and Saudi Arabia signed a large order of 110 billion, involving trade, finance and other fields

According to Saudi media reports, during President Xi's visit, China and Saudi Arabia will sign more than 20 preliminary cooperation agreements with a total value of over 110 billion Saudi riyals (about 29.3 billion U.S. dollars), as well as a strategic partnership agreement involving From trade, finance, infrastructure, energy, communications and other fields.

In addition to stipulating that Saudi Arabia exports a large amount of oil to China every year, this agreement also intends to use RMB to settle oil imports from China, and invites Chinese high-tech companies including Huawei to help Saudi Arabia build communication facilities, making Saudi Arabia a "digital partner in the Gulf region." center".

Judging from the content of this Sino-Saudi cooperation agreement, Saudi Arabia not only hopes to export a large amount of oil to China to earn profits, but also hopes to use China's power to get rid of the threat of the United States.

Analysts believe that these cooperation projects will allow Chinese companies to participate more deeply, including the US$50 million Saudi ultra-modern city NEOM project, to assist Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plan to wean the Saudi economy from dependence on oil and transform it into a new one. a more diverse vision.

The report also pointed out that China and Saudi Arabia are coordinating Saudi Arabia's "Vision 2030" plan and China's "Belt and Road" initiative. .

"Looking east" has become the trend of the Middle East countries

For quite a long time in the past, Middle Eastern countries have made every effort to integrate into the Western-led world economic system and emulate the Western-style modernization path. As a result, a series of structural problems such as "de-industrialization" and the widening gap between the rich and the poor have resulted. From 1980 to 2004, the average annual GDP growth rate in the Arab world was less than 0.5%, and one-third of the population lived below the poverty line, far behind the world average. The drastic changes in the Middle East in 2011 can be said to be the inevitable result of the lagging development of Arab countries. The lag in economic development in the Arab world is largely related to the old international economic order dominated by the West.

The upheavals in the Middle East in 2011 did not change the situation of economic lag, but made the economic situation of the relevant countries worse. According to World Bank statistics, 8 million people in the Middle East and North Africa lived below the poverty line in 2011, and this number soared to 28 million in 2018. A poll in early 2021 showed that more than half of the respondents in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan believe that the current living conditions are worse than before the upheaval in the Middle East. A poll in December 2019 showed that 61 percent of respondents wanted the government to make the economy a priority. In this context, Middle East countries are increasingly shifting from "competing for security" to "competing for economy". "Fighting the economy" has become a top priority in the Arab world, and "development first" has become a new consensus among Middle Eastern countries. Under the background of economic failure caused by "looking west", Arab countries are increasingly turning to "looking east", pinning their hopes on the opportunities brought by China's development.

The "Belt and Road" initiative is in line with the real needs of the Arab countries to "compete economically". At present, the “Belt and Road” initiative proposed by China is actually reopening the “Silk Road” and will bring unprecedented development opportunities to Middle Eastern countries.

In short, several historic changes in the Middle East, as well as the spillover effects brought about by the rise of China, have prompted China and Arab states to face historic opportunities for deepening cooperation. The two sides should cherish and seize this historic opportunity to deepen cooperation in various fields.