Transregional Authoritarianism: Sino-Arab Collaboration in the COVID-19 Context

• In Event: New Approaches to MENA Research for COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

From discrimination against Chinese-read migrant workers, via intraregional competition for China’s favor to collaboration in infrastructural megaprojects, vaccine development and digital surveillance techniques: Arab-Chinese relations in times of Covid-19 are complex and multi-layered. Yet, established regime-centric approaches, fail to see this complexity by almost exclusively focusing on questions of authoritarian regime collaboration (see for example Diamond et al. 2016, 17). Such approaches not only ignore the diversity of involved actors and the inherently transregional nature of contemporary authoritarian power, but also bear the risk of reproducing binary notions of authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy that fundamentally ignore the latter’s coercive core. In this article, we provide a selective overview of Arab-Chinese relations and different forms of authoritarian collaboration in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the role of different infrastructures. Our key objective is to highlight the diversity of involved actors and emerging alliances beyond the level of the nation-state. Moreover, we address the role of digital and physical infrastructures and the merger of such for the travelling of autocratic practices in the COVID-19 context. This emphasis on infrastructure, understood as simultaneously enabling the circulation of goods and capital, as well as reinforcing containment and facilitating new forms of managing and repressing public discontent, provides us with a helpful lens for the development of a truly transregional understanding of authoritarian collaboration. We challenge simplistic depictions of China using the pandemic as a means for the expanding its influence by enquiring into the precise nature of the new emerging forms of authoritarian collaboration. The article is driven by the following research questions: Which Chinese actors (beyond the central state) collaborate with which different state and/or non-state actors from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) or intend to foster authoritarian power in the region? In short, how does Arab-Chinese authoritarian collaboration look like in times of Covid-19? In this interpretive analysis of Arab-Chinese authoritarian collaboration, we focus on selected national pandemic plans, the travelling of authoritarian practices, and the role of transnational corporations. We discuss Arab-Chinese collaboration in the development of both digital (tracing apps) and physical infrastructures (e.g., the “Health Silk Road”). In doing so, we build on literatures on authoritarian practices, authoritarian learning, critical infrastructure studies and transregional connections.

Author

• Julia Gurol, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg