On March 24, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi begins his Middle East tour: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, UAE and Bahrain.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry will make a detour of some of his future possessions (Middle Eastern States of China *).

For China's influence in the Middle East is growing every day.

In all the states of the Middle East, where the foreign minister is going today, China has its own global projects and interests.

  • © Wikimedia commons

And China's influence in Iran (and, accordingly, in the entire Shiite world axis) is so great today that the visit of the head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry to Iran (March 26 as scheduled) could bring a breakthrough in the American-Iranian negotiation process.

The political processes taking place in the Middle East today are extremely interesting from the point of view of changing the geopolitical balance.

Against the background of the fact that America is painfully reducing its presence in the region - the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan is scheduled for May 1, 2021, the United States is also reducing its presence in Iraq - China, on the contrary, is increasing its influence every day.

And since the Chinese political style of "soft power" is fundamentally different from the aggressive American style, it is gaining more and more supporters.

China does not conduct bombing, acts secretly, covertly, through intermediaries - and at the same time is fabulously rich, which in the East has always evoked reverence and adoration.

Eyck Freymann, author of the bestselling book One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World, is one of the world's most promising researchers of the influence of modern China on countries and governments of foreign countries. Obama announced her pivot towards Asia (East).

“In 2012, Wang Ji, China's most prominent foreign policy observer, came up with a concept he called marching westward.

The inevitable US withdrawal from the Middle East represents a potentially win-win, Wang argued, because the US already desperately needs China's help to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Wang's essay was published shortly before the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, when Xi Jinping was to be elevated to the highest office, and heralds the strategic logic, concept and funding priorities that were soon institutionalized in the Belt and Road format. , further BRI, ”writes Freimann.

One Belt One Road has become China's largest infrastructure project in history.

Every Chinese worker, peasant, province, city, village worked for "One Belt - One Road."

Universities, banks, the country's largest business - all were thrown into the mobilization of a great foreign policy project.

Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on building ports, railways, laying fiber-optic cables and launching satellites far beyond the country's borders.

However, not all of China's political elite is so inspired by such an acute concentration of the new course of the Middle Kingdom towards the Middle East, because more than one empire was drowning in the hot sands, striving to conquer it.

In a response essay to Wang, another Chinese scholar, Xian Xiao, argued that China first and foremost should pay attention to its neighbors and avoid such a generous distribution of national wealth in foreign, difficult regions, and reminded of what happened to US ambitions in Afghanistan and Iraq. ...

Scholar Jie Zhang, who wrote for China's Global Time back in 2013, warned that this strategy would damage relations with Russia, India and the United States and that these investments in “dangerous areas” would generate great power antagonism and fierce confrontation with other global players.

Eight years later, we see that this forecast has already been partially realized: Russia is integrating itself into the sphere of Chinese influence, but the growing influence of China, including its military-political union with Iran, seriously worried the United States and forced them to make a military bet on India as the only global counterbalance to China today.

The US will pump up India militarily and financially to create an equal counterbalance to China.

India, I must say, has its own serious scores with China - through Pakistan, the Chinese bridgehead in the region, Kashmir is shaking and terrorist destabilization is taking place from the north.

In March 2021, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited India to build a new security architecture in the Indo-Pacific.

The first words he said as head of defense on his first international trip as he stepped off his E-4B, a militarized version of a Boeing 747, in Hawaii: "China is our coming threat."

And India for the United States is a 5-trillion dollar economy, the only one that has experience of clashes and battles with the most powerful machine of the PLA (National Liberation Army of China).

The United States closely followed the course of armed clashes between the PLA and the Indian army in the Himalayas at the end of 2020 and new clashes with the Pakistani army (which can be partly called a Chinese proxy) in 2021, which ended in a de-escalation initiated by the Chinese and Pakistani sides. ...

The military specialists of the department analyzed the strengths and weaknesses and today are ready to carry out serious equipment and training of the Indian armed forces.

In response to the growing global ambitions of Chinese domination, 2017 also saw the emergence of QUAD, a quad-core alliance between the United States, Japan, India and Australia.

But back to the Middle East.

The very fabric of the Middle East, woven from multinational, religiously conflict states, looks like quicksand in which one can get bogged down.

Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Israel - cooperation with some automatically makes enemies for others.

But China is pragmatic, quiet and orderly.

China does not make noise or advertise its Middle East deals and alliances.

Even the military confrontation with the United States in Afghanistan is going on in such a way that no one hears about China.

Vice President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh recently spoke about the completion of the investigation into the murder of Freshta Kohistani, a young women's rights activist, committed on December 24, 2020.

“Her killers were found and captured after their return from Peshawar, where they received a killing reward from the Taliban **.

Meanwhile, Pakistani government minister Mahmoud Khan is inspecting Peshawar to prepare facilities that he hopes to include in CPEC's investment package.

That is, the Taliban is in the zone of the multibillion-dollar Sino-Pakistani trade corridor, but China never gets into the reports of killings, terrorist attacks, violence in the region, because what does China have to do with it when a Pakistani organization is sponsoring Afghan violence?

  • Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

  • AFP

  • © PRESIDENT.IR

The only high-profile exception was the 25-year agreement on strategic cooperation between China and Iran, worth a phenomenal quarter-trillion dollars.

But it was rather a leak that was not agreed with the PRC - so the Iranian hawks wanted to brag about the deal to the United States, that the official Iranian media, as if on command, in the summer of 2020 trumpeted the signing of the agreement under the deathly silence of Beijing, which never commented on the details of the deal.

How many have you heard, for example, about the amount of investment by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund in China's SenseTime, a facial recognition software company?

Did you know that a Chinese state-owned enterprise leased an Israeli port in Haifa for 25 years?

And even turned down a US site inspection request?

Saudi Arabia - # 1 among Chinese oil exporters, with which Iran is desperately trying to compete with terrible dumping?

After Russia, Iraq became the No. 3 oil exporter to the Celestial Empire.

In October 2019, the Iraqi Energy Minister said: "China is our main choice as a strategic partner in the long term."

All Shiite paramilitaries from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon praise China as if they were competing with each other.

When the United States struck pro-Iranian groups in Syria (on the border with Iraq) on February 25, the Syrian state agency SANA aspirated a Chinese diplomat who formally "asked to respect the sovereignty of Syria": before our eyes, the states of the region already consider China the supreme arbiter in their domestic and international disputes and conflicts and turn to him to protect them from the United States.

Saudi Arabia has launched teaching Chinese as a third language in all schools and universities.

Together with Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait have invited the PLA-owned Huawei to build their 5G telecommunications infrastructure despite US pressure.

China has long deployed 5G networks in Iran, and Pakistan is completing the last section of fiber-optic cross-border cable, which will create the Digital Silk Road.

It will be connected to all countries belonging to the "One Belt - One Road".

In short, the Middle East lined up, trying to win favor in the same way that vassals seek the favor and protection of a great emperor.

Its immense wealth makes even radical Islamists more accommodating.

So, for example, on January 23, 2021, in Pakistani Karachi (CPEC outpost), crowds of Muslims were brought out onto the streets of the multimillion city, chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian brothers "oppressed by the Zionists".

And just a few days ago, a branch of the largest private bank in Pakistan, HBL, was opened in Beijing, which became the first Pakistani bank in the capital of China and one of three banks in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa offering "through intermediation in yuan."

Everything seems to be nothing, but the same HBL has been working since 2017 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, which is known throughout the world for the so-called camps for Uyghur Muslims, according to the United States.

However, Pakistan wisely does not see any infringements on the Muslim brothers in China.

To be continued.

* Middle Eastern States of China - Middle Eastern states of China.

** "Taliban" - the organization was recognized as terrorist by the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated 02.14.2003

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.