What China actually stands to gain from the overthrow of the Assad government

If you’ve been closely following China in the Middle East over the past decade, you haven’t had to think too much about Syria. There has been little in meaningful engagement between the two countries, despite recent pronouncements that the fall of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime represents the loss of an important partner for Beijing. The reality is that the dramatic events in Syria reshape the strategic environment for China, but at the bilateral level, little is likely to change.

The most obvious reason to assume that Syria was important to Beijing was China’s use of its United Nations Security Council (UNSC) veto at key points in Syria’s civil war to prop up the Assad regime. China vetoed UNSC resolutions relating to the Syrian civil war eight times, which is especially notable since Beijing has only ever used its veto sixteen times. That fully half of its vetoes were used to prevent efforts to oust Assad lends credibility to the idea that his government must have mattered to China.

In this case, China’s support for the Assad regime was likely more about perceived threats than any affinity for the Assad family. When the Arab Spring began, China was facing a great deal of domestic unrest. The situations in Tibet and Xinjiang were untenable for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and there was massive pushback against corruption, with an average of five hundred “mass incidents” (CCP-speak for protests) per day in 2010. Revolutions in the Arab world heightened a sense of vulnerability among CCP leadership.

Syria’s civil war further complicated Beijing’s response to the Arab Spring. Thousands of Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China—mostly from Xinjiang—traveled to Syria to fight alongside al-Qaeda against the Syrian government. For the CCP, the prospect of rebels fighting in Syria and then returning home was especially troublesome. One Uyghur combatant quoted in an AP news article in 2017 reportedly said, “We didn’t care how the fighting went or who Assad was. We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.” A defeated Syrian government, therefore, had serious potential repercussions for Beijing.

Another reason that Assad’s survival seemed important to China was a recent increase in China-Syria bilateral engagement. In January 2022, Assad announced that Syria had joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This seemed like a natural fit; the BRI is associated with infrastructure contracting and Syria had a dire need for infrastructure after a decade of war. However, the assumption that Chinese institutions were willing to finance unprofitable projects in high-risk environments has not reflected the reality since 2017, the high point of BRI lending. In fact, China had not made any major contracts or investments in Syria since 2010. Even more telling is the miniscule level of trade between the two countries. The peak of China-Syria trade over the past fifteen years was in 2011, when it was valued at approximately two billion dollars. In 2022, it was a mere $541 million. Chinese companies have no shortage of attractive markets in the Middle East, and Syria hasn’t been one of them for a long time.

That said, Assad did visit China in September 2023 to attend the Asian Games, during which he signed a China-Syria strategic partnership agreement. But a strategic partnership is far from an alliance—it is a mechanism that Beijing uses to focus on areas of mutual interest and comes with no commitments other than to cooperate on issues where it is convenient.

To put this in context, sixteen of the Arab League’s twenty-two member states have strategic partnerships with China. The only member countries that do not are Comoros, Lebanon, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Since Syria signed its agreement with Beijing last year, Tunisia and Libya have also been designated as strategic partners and Bahrain has become a comprehensive strategic partner with China. But there is little in the way of strategic engagement with any of these recent partnerships, which makes it look like Beijing is simply ticking diplomatic boxes at this point, in an effort to show it has deep ties with everyone in the Middle East and North Africa region. All of which is to say that Syria’s strategic partnership was not especially meaningful, and little had been done to enhance the bilateral relationship since it was announced.

Thus, China-Syria ties were less important than they appeared from the headlines. But the collapse of Assad’s regime is nevertheless troubling for Beijing because of what it says about Russia and Iran, two of China’s much more important partners. That neither Moscow nor Tehran was able to prop up Assad any longer demonstrates their diminished power. Leaders in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran have been cooperating bilaterally, trilaterally, and multilaterally through BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all with the goal of advancing a multipolar international order. Neither Russia nor Iran look like poles of power or influence right now, and Chinese leaders have to be worried about both countries’ strength and durability.

As for China’s overall presence in the Middle East, not much will change in the near term. As I have argued before, China is primarily an economic actor in the Middle East and its relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Egypt are the load-bearing pillars of its regional policy. This will not be seriously affected by events in Syria.

Will China’s support for Assad subject Beijing to blowback from Syria’s new leaders? Syrians who saw photos of a smiling Assad with Chinese leader Xi Jinping no doubt resent that China long legitimized his brutal oppression and repeatedly used its UNSC veto in support of his government. At the same time, China is not at the top of the list of the most hated external actors among Syrians; Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah have that distinction. The incoming Syrian government might look at China the same way the Taliban did: as a possibly useful but not especially trustworthy country. If Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has difficulty building relations with the United States and Europe, then Syria’s new leaders may be willing to overlook China’s ties to the old regime as it looks for international partners.

In short, the end of the Assad era makes the Middle East far more complicated for Beijing, but it does not undermine China’s regional presence or threaten its most important regional relationships.