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The History of China's Relationships With the Middle East
China has always had some level of interest in the Middle East. It's considered an important strategic area, but also had that interest be limited by either ability or just fundamentally what their interests were as they shifted over time. In the 1950s and 1960s, you had a situation where China was doing two things at the same time. On one hand, it was reaching out to Arab and Middle Eastern states because it was interested in sort of displacing their relationship with Taiwan. But on the other hand, they also viewed the region through the lens of politics and ideology.