1. Introduction

Although China has a long history of relations with the GCC countries, Yemen, Iran and Iraq, its involvement in Gulf security affairs is relatively new when compared with that of the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Egypt. China's diplomacy towards this region in the past six decades has evolved from an ideology-driven to a pragmatism-based model, and from a logic of “balance of power” to a logic of “strategic equilibrium”.

Throughout the past half Century, the Gulf states have been preoccupied with the logic of balance of power instead of collective security. Based on zero-sum game conceptions, the major Gulf powers have engaged in ongoing hostilities with one another, making a win-win collective security arrangement difficult to envisage. Given this background, and China's desire not to be drawn into regional conflicts, it is not surprising that the Chinese attitude to Gulf conflict resolution has been based on a trade-off between economic benefit and moral obligation. China aims to safeguard its growing commercial interests in the Gulf, maintain its great power status in the world, and meanwhile avoid sectarian and geopolitical entanglement, such that pursuing a specific collective security initiative in the Gulf would be very difficult. This chapter selects five cases of Gulf conflict and China's responses to them: the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf Crisis of 1990-1991, the Iraq War of 2003, the Iranian nuclear issue of 2006-2015, and the Iran-Saudi discord since 2015. Beijing has consistently appealed for peace and dialogue in the Gulf, but it nonetheless believes that a Gulf collective security structure, albeit critical, would be hard to achieve in the short term.

2. Taiqi Diplomacy: China's Participation in International Conflict Resolution

During the Cold War period, Chinese policymakers perceived the Gulf as a critical part of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which itself was a part of Zhongjian Didai (“the middle ground”) between the Capitalist and the Communist camps. In this middle ground, China competed with the US, seen as the imperial hegemon, and later with the USSR, identified as a revisionist, socialist empire from the 1960s onward. The Middle East gradually became an arena in the US-Soviet Cold War, and collective security there was out of the question. China sided with the Palestinian cause in the Israeli-Arab conflict, giving economic and military assistance, as well as political and diplomatic support, to Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Support was also given to some other Arab countries and movements. Through taking on a significant burden of economic aid, Mao Zedong's China strove to break the blockade of the Western and Soviet blocs in the 1960s.