What's China up to in the Middle East?
11 - 12.30pm BST
Battle of Ideas Festival
Robert Runcie Room, Church House, Dean’s Yard, London SW1P 3NZ
Recently, Al-Jazeera wrote that ‘China has no selfish interests in the Palestinian question’. So, is China purely interested in peace and stability in the region or is it motivated by its potential challenge to Western hegemony? Does China’s model of no-strings capital investment to anyone that will support it help stabilise the Middle East, or merely empower the region’s most destabilising regimes? Indeed, is China politically shrewd or dangerously naïve? If the West continues to underinvest in economic statecraft, will it wake up to find Beijing the leading external power in the region by default?
Speakers:
- Dr Ahmed Aboudouh, associate fellow, Middle East & North Africa Programme, Chatham House
- Mary Dejevsky, former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington; special correspondent in China; writer and broadcaster
- Humphrey Hawksley, Asia specialist; journalist; author, Man on Ice, Asian Waters and The Third World War
- Dr Edward Howell, lecturer, University of Oxford; research fellow; Pharos Foundation
Chair & Producer:
- Austin Williams, director, Future Cities Project; visiting scholar, XJTLU, Suzhou, China; author, China’s Urban Revolution
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