Riyadh hosts first GCC-China high-level meeting since the war

Riyadh hosted a high-level meeting between China and its Gulf Cooperation Council partners on Thursday. Senior officials lauded the considerable progress achieved since the birth of the GCC-China Strategic Partnership in December 2022 and discussed initiatives to strengthen this collaboration.

The meeting was the first since the start of the Iran war in February, and the conflict dominated much of the discussion, especially the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s action left China the biggest loser after the GCC states, with about 42 percent of its oil imports passing through the waterway. Beijing has also condemned Iran’s strikes on GCC countries, and made considerable entreaties with the Iranian side, at all levels, to stop the attacks and reopen the strait — to no avail.

However, China has stopped short of fully supporting GCC countries’ efforts at the UN Security Council. As a compromise, Beijing abstained, but did not veto, Security Council Resolution 2817 in March, which condemned Iran’s attacks as a “breach of international law and a serious threat to international peace and security.” It also condemned Iran’s “closing or obstructing international navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.” But when the GCC later submitted another draft resolution dedicated to freedom of navigation, China joined Russia in vetoing it, thus participating unwittingly in limiting the UN’s ability to help reopen the waterway.

This diplomatic impasse has been a critical subject in GCC-China discussions. There is an expectation that Beijing needs to play a more active role in maritime diplomacy, especially as China enjoys a close relationship with Iran on the one hand, and strongly believes in freedom of navigation in both the Strait of Hormuz and Bab Al-Mandab.

In other forums, GCC-China diplomatic coordination has led to success. For example, in May 2025, they partnered to ensure the success of the first GCC-China-ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, against considerable odds.

Diplomatic relations between GCC countries and the People’s Republic of China go back decades. Kuwait was the first to establish relations in 1971; Saudi Arabia was last in 1991, with the remaining four member states somewhere in between. But trade did not pick up until many years later and investment even later.

More than any other superpower, China has been keen to cultivate good relations with the GCC as a bloc, in addition to its strong relations with each member state. When President Jiang Zemin visited Saudi Arabia in November 1999, he made a point of meeting the organization’s leadership. Other Chinese leaders, including President Hu Jintao in his two visits to Saudi Arabia in 2006 and 2009, and President Xi Jinping in 2016, have done likewise.

These formal ties eventually paid off. The two-way GCC-China trade was minuscule at $2 billion in 1992, but last year it was close to $319 billion, or about 19 percent of total GCC’s external trade — more than with the EU and the US combined. For more than a decade, China has been the GCC’s top trading partner, and today its GCC trade accounts for 70 percent of its trade with the Arab region.

Even with this trade success story, the two partners are trying for more. The free trade agreement they are close to finalizing aims at integrating their economies. It will reduce tariffs or eliminate them altogether on most traded goods. It will also give wide-ranging market access by granting “national treatment” privileges to each side’s businesses in many sectors.

Trade has been growing by leaps and bounds, but investment less so, and that was one issue under discussion in the meeting on Thursday. It is difficult to come up with precise numbers, but China’s investment in the GCC region does not appear to exceed 6 percent of all foreign direct investment in the six states. GCC investments in China are also limited to about 4 percent of all GCC outward investment. The free trade agreement may improve these figures through better market access.

The GCC-China Strategic Partnership was announced during Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia in 2022, when he held a meeting with the leaders of the six GCC countries and approved an ambitious five-year joint action plan. Since then, the two parties have expanded the scope of their dialogue beyond trade and investment to include political and strategic dialogue, security, defense, meteorology, emergency response, space exploration, and nuclear energy.

In 2023, China scored a historical breakthrough in a rare agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic ties, which had been severely strained since January 2016 when Iranian mobs attacked and burned the Saudi Embassy in Tehran.

In 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year “comprehensive strategic agreement,” believed to involve massive Chinese investments in Iran. Despite the deal, China-Iran trade has declined from $45 billion in 2011 to below $15 billion in 2025, less than 5 percent of China’s trade with the GCC countries. This year, because of the war, China-Iran trade has declined further.

Because its terms have not been disclosed, there have been concerns that the 25-year agreement may include cooperation in military technology and training. Although China’s direct arms sales to Iran are believed to have declined, Western media have reported that dual-use materials that may support Iran’s military programs, such as sodium perchlorate, which reportedly can be used as fuel for ballistic missiles, may have continued. They also indicate that Chinese-manufactured components have been found in Iranian drones used in the Ukraine war, although those articles could have been bought outside official channels. Historically, China has been a key partner in Iran’s nuclear development, although the nature of that cooperation may have changed since the signing of the Iran nuclear deal.

The meeting on Thursday was focused on practical recommendations to advance GCC-China strategic partnership in all areas — political, security, economic, and cultural. As usual, those proposals, once finalized, will be submitted for endorsement by the ministers of the seven countries later this year, in anticipation of the second China-GCC summit of heads of state in the near future. Consultations will continue between senior officials while they make preparations for these two future meetings.

• Dr. Abdel Aziz Aluwaisheg is the GCC assistant secretary-general for political affairs and negotiation. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily represent those of the GCC.

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