How China won over the Middle East

In April, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi embarked on a six-nation Middle Eastern tour to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman. ‘Belt and Road’ cooperation, economic development and the Covid pandemic were the topics of discussion. The treatment of China’s Muslim Uighur population in detention camps, which some in the West have described as genocidal, didn’t come up.

Both China and Saudi Arabia cleave to the belief that internal affairs are nobody else’s business — or at least as long as there are overriding economic interests at stake. Compare the silence of Muslim countries on the Uighur issue with the loud faux anger when the Danish newspaper Jyllands–Posten published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005. Embassies were closed and Danish products boycotted. Between February and June 2006, Danish exports to the Middle East halved. Unlike when dealing with China, Muslim countries, in dealing with Denmark, had little to lose by playing to the religious anger on the streets.

At the 41st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in June 2019, 22 countries wrote a letter of protest regarding China’s treatment of the Uighurs. The ‘22 letter’ noted ‘credible reports of arbitrary detention in large-scale places of detention’. Surely the protesting countries included Muslim nations in support of their fellow believers? No. With the exception of Japan, all the signatories of the letter were majority white, Christian countries.

Not only did the Muslim nations fail to support the Uighurs but 21 Muslim countries co-signed a counter-letter which complained about the ‘22 letter’ for its politicisation of human rights issues. The counter-letter, which won the support of 50 nations in total, astonishingly went on to praise China’s remarkable achievements in ‘protecting and promoting human rights through development’. Signatories included four of the big five Middle Eastern countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt.