China outcompetes US with Saudi Arabia, Iran deal

Wang Yi (center), a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, with representatives from Saudi Arabia and Iran in Beijing on Friday. [Photo by Wang Jing/China Daily]

By Zhang Zhouxiang

For long, China has insisted that security and development are two keys to solving the problems and conflicts in the Middle East. And now the keys have opened a most sophisticated lock as Saudi Arabia and Iran announced the agreement to resume diplomatic relationship under a China-brokered deal in Beijing.

One party after another, including the UN secretary-general, has expressed its welcome to the trilateral joint statement. It is in the interests of all and serves the value of all to turn rivalry into friendship so as to seek common prosperity to minimize possible conflicts even bloodshed. Peace is the most precious property of human kind in international relations and China has kept that property well.

China doesn’t mean to compete, but it is leaving the US behind in the race toward peace. While China makes peace, the US makes war. The US as the world's only superpower has appeared in almost every region with conflict, but its existence always makes things worse. In the Middle East alone, it prolonged the Syrian civil war, complicated the Israel-Palestine conflict, and played the regional countries against each other.

The essential difference lies in their ultimate concern, namely that China pursues peace and security for all while the US pursues its own hegemonic interests and those for the lobby groups and military-industrial complex. It is the ends that decide the means.

May peace return to the Middle East. China will work toward the goal and hopes the world’s only superpower will join its cause.