The Red Star and the Crescent by Reardon-Anderson James;

Author:Reardon-Anderson, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Risks and challenges for China in Iraq

China is facing a series of challenges in Iraq: strategic, political, and economic. Strategically, the biggest question looming is whether China will continue to adhere to its historical non-intervention policy in the domestic affairs of other countries. The policy has served China well in the last three decades, in stark contrast to the US and Europe with its long colonial history. However, China is not the same country as it was three or four decades ago, and the stakes have dramatically changed. Since 2008, China has become more assertive, given its increased capabilities and the reduced influence of the US after the bitter experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once the US announced its intention to withdraw its troops from Iraq, both the Chinese and Iraqi leadership realized that the US influence will begin to decrease and new opportunities would open for other powers.

China’s energy security, as highlighted above, has become a core principle of China’s foreign policy, given the reliance of the country’s economic growth, technological advance, and human development on securing its oil supplies. “Beijing is ready to accept additional costs to ensure access to energy supplies from the region.”52 So far these have been restricted to the realm of oil investments, such as constructing a pipeline from Iran to Pakistan, without ever sending troops to protect those investments. An important feature that could lead to a change in the long term is that most of the oil and gas projects that Chinese national oil companies “have invested in since 2000 were in politically fragile countries” such as Sudan, South Sudan, Venezuela, and, since 2005, Iraq.53 China has adopted a long-term outlook in its investments in the oil sector in Iraq, but given the almost unending state of instability, Chinese companies cannot ensure that the oil and gas they are helping to produce will reach its final destination in China. As some observers opined, the more deeply China becomes “embedded in the economies of the region, it will be harder to walk away from any supplier without causing itself severe energy and economic hardship.”54 This raises the issue of Beijing’s non-intervention to protect its colossal investments if one of the suppliers, say Iraq, disintegrates politically, threatening both energy supplies and China’s billions of investments. There is a further complication: the safety of Chinese workers in a country such as Iraq would carry internal political risks if many workers were to be harmed either by infighting between different groups or by acts of terrorism.

A principal constraint facing China’s strategy in Iraq is its lack of political influence over the government and its public declarations that it would not send any troops to support Iraqi authorities. Frequently, Chinese analysts argue that there is not much political involvement in Iraqi politics or its military affairs, and “none of the chaos there has anything to do with us.”55 Of course this is quite a simplification, but it does abet the Chinese “no-offend” policy that has served them very well in the region since the 1980s.

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