China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, met with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in Beijing on Wednesday, as Mr. Xi pushes to expand China’s influence in the Middle East and cast his country as an alternative to the United States for leadership in global diplomacy.
In the lead-up to Mr. Abbas’s four-day visit, which began on Tuesday, Chinese officials had repeatedly suggested that China could help pave the way for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Chinese state media had also fiercely criticized the United States for failing to broker a settlement between the two.
And on Wednesday, Mr. Xi put forward a three-part proposal for a two-state solution to the conflict, according to the state media. The plan appeared largely similar to a proposition that Mr. Xi had put forward in 2013, which failed to achieve any breakthroughs.
“Justice must be returned to Palestine as soon as possible,” Xinhua, the state news agency, reported Mr. Xi as saying. “China is willing to play a positive role in helping Palestine achieve internal reconciliation and promote peace talks.”
Mr. Xi has been working to burnish his image as a force for global peace in recent months, especially as China has emerged from three years of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic and sought to reassert its position as a major power on the world stage. Mr. Xi has hosted a stream of world leaders this year, including from France, Brazil and Iran. Beijing has suggested that it could play a role in mediating an end to the war in Ukraine, though Western leaders have been skeptical of that claim.
And in perhaps the biggest diplomatic victory for China, it facilitated secret talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March that led to the two countries’ surprise diplomatic rapprochement — a role that analysts said could make Beijing a major power player in the Middle East and challenge the United States’ longtime influence there.
Of course, settling the seemingly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is a vastly different task than providing mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which had already been looking to reduce tensions. China also has strong economic ties with both the Saudis and the Iranians.
China has long been friendly with Palestinian leaders, and this week’s visit by Mr. Abbas is his fifth to the country in his nearly two decades as the Palestinian Authority’s president. China has frequently spoken in support of Palestinian statehood and backed pro-Palestinian positions at the United Nations. On Wednesday, Mr. Xi told Mr. Abbas that China and the Palestinians were “good friends and good partners,” according to the Chinese state media. The two men also announced a strategic partnership between China and the Palestinian Authority.
But China’s relationship with Israel is less robust. And Israel’s alliance with the United States all but ensures that it would be much warier of giving China a role in any negotiations. Israel is already under pressure from Washington to limit Chinese investment in the country.
In that sense, Mr. Xi’s meeting with Mr. Abbas was less about moving toward a resolution of the conflict than about demonstrating China’s intention to be a greater presence in the Middle East going forward, analysts said.
“China should be and will be quite cautious — so many superpowers squandered their resources, time, energy” in protracted conflicts in the region, said Da Wei, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “But I do think China wants to be more proactive in areas like the Middle East.”
He continued, “We can say this is a learning process for China: China is learning to be a major power in that region, or a power in the world. And if you want to play a role on the world stage, obviously, the Middle East is one of the regions.”
Indeed, China has generally been ramping up its engagement in the Middle East. Mr. Xi visited Saudi Arabia in December. China and Saudi Arabia have also been deepening investment ties, and Saudi officials have bluntly dismissed concerns that their growing relationship with Beijing could cause problems with the United States.
Chinese state media outlets had talked up the possibility of a breakthrough on Israel and the Palestinian leadership. But in the Middle East, the latest proposal did not raise many hopes.
“Against the backdrop of a wave of reconciliation in the Middle East, there is great anticipation for whether this visit will bring more hope for peace in the region,” an editorial in Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party tabloid, said on Tuesday. It also accused Washington of being “deeply culpable” in the Palestinian issue.
China has offered to mediate relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians before, including in 2013, 2017 and 2021. Mr. Xi’s three-part plan on Wednesday did not appear to deviate much from prior proposals. It included the creation of a fully sovereign Palestinian state, based on 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital; a call for increased international aid to a Palestinian state; and the convening of a “larger, more authoritative, more influential international peace conference” to promote talks, though the plan did not offer details.
After peace negotiations collapsed in 2014, there appears to be little chance of their near-future resumption, with or without Chinese involvement: Both Israelis and Palestinians are deeply divided and cannot agree among themselves about how to approach the conflict, let alone find common ground with the other side. Israel’s current government is its most right-wing ever, few of its members support the concept of Palestinian sovereignty, and Chinese intervention is unlikely to change that.
Still, China’s role in brokering the Saudi-Iran deal, and its growing global stature generally, have changed the stakes of its potential involvement, said Robert Mogielnicki, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, who has studied Chinese-Middle East relations. China’s past involvement in the region has been primarily economic, he said; now, Beijing is signaling that it is “graduating” from that level of support.
“The particular context of what many people perceive as a shifting global order potentially gives more significance to this visit,” he said.
Patrick Kingsley and Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting, and Joy Dong and John Liu contributed research
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