#142 Beijing in the Middle-East - Dr. Matteo Capasso

Speaker 1: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. between you and me, us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Mamadou: Welcome back to another episode of The Malcolm Effect and joining me is a longtime friend of the show, comrade, someone I consider a teacher, an amazing guest, and now a professor in China and also the editor-in-chief of the Middle East Critique, Professor Mateo Capasso. Welcome back to The Malcolm Effect. How are you, Professor?

Matteo Capasso: Thank you, Mamadou. Thank you for having me. Thank you for the kind introduction.

Mamadou: All good. Thank you. So I thought it was a necessary conversation to have on we see so much online, right? And again, I know that online can be some source of information, news, right? some analysis, but nothing really gets down into the kind of weeds unless we have conversations like this or we continue our reading. So I think straight away, so many people immediately say, but isn't China Iran's ally? Where is China in this moment? So I want to begin to unpack that and discuss that. And not even, you know, for me, it's not about having this somewhat of a juvenile reactionary conversation or take, but rather let's talk about, let's have an analysis, let's locate structurally when we think of China in the region. And I think that's such a much more fruitful conversation. So immediately, let's, before we get into the specifics, Let's just get into the framing. I think it's good to orient ourselves within this conversation. So when people talk about China in the Middle East, and I know our preferred term is China in the Arab-Iranian region, what do they usually get wrong?

Matteo Capasso: I mean, this is an important conversation that we're about to have. If you allow me, let me just, before we get into the substance of this, let me just say something about the frame of the conversation itself we're going to have. Because as you rightly pointed out, we don't want to have a juvenile discussion around this. But we are, in 2026, China is pretty much everywhere these days in the discussion of what relates to the Global South and beyond. And the attention that China is getting reflects something real, the sense that the world is shifting and China's weight in this transformation of the world is undeniable. At the same time, we have to flag a danger at the outset of this, which is the temptation to zoom in on China. as though Beijing, the government, were going to save the world, or as though the transformation of the global order that we are witnessing, and we're going to talk about this more, is essentially China's project, and the rest of us are all watching from the outside as spectators. That framing, as you very well know, is juvenile, is politically disabling as well, because China is one significant actor in a much larger structural transformation, the erosion of US unipolarity, the assertion of sovereign development projects, including the Chinese one, the building of alternative institutions and financial architectures that did not exist 20 years ago. China is firmly part of this transformation, and its weight within this transformation is substantial. But the transformation is not China's to deliver. It is a collective project whose outcome depends on political choices being made or not being made by states and movements across the entire south of the world. Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Arab world, and so on. And also Europe, I mean, everywhere. When those choices are reduced to a question of what China will do, why is China not doing this? We are already in the wrong analytical territory, in a way, if you want. So this is why I think you want to approach this conversation today in a way that, let's talk about China with precision, without inflating its role into a salvation narrative. neither dismissing it with the usual Western accusations, which leads me to answer to the question you posed, which is what do people get wrong when they talk about China? I think the most common mistake when people talk about China in the Middle East is not getting the facts wrong. The facts are increasingly well documented in a way. The mistake is using a fallacious analytical vocabulary toolkit to describe these facts. So most analysis reaches for one of the three frames that I think I consider the most prominent. The first one is that China is an opportunist state filling a vacuum left by the US decline. Yeah. Then we have China as a new imperial power, replicating the Western model, but with a different flag. And then we have China, which is, again, it's similar to the first one, but China is not an opportunist, more as a purely transactional actor, interested only in oil and market access. And of course, I'm talking about the Middle East here. Now, each of these framings has assumptions that belong to a different historical experience, specifically the experience of Western statecraft, of Western history in this region, and applies them to a relationship that has a fundamentally different character. This is why we need a different lens. And that lens, as you know and your listeners know very much, is a lens that matters because it asks a different set of questions. Rather than asking who is present in the region, how much influence they have, it poses questions like what kind of model of accumulation is being organized? What kind of economic integration is China sustaining or enabling vis-a-vis the Middle East? With what structural consequences, what kind of structural consequences this integration has for the states involved? Under what mechanism does this take place? That question immediately distinguishes between, as you see, forms of engagement that look superficially similar on the surface. investment, trade, infrastructure, because you could say, and I know we're going to get into this at some point, you could say China is trading with Israel, China is trading with Saudi Arabia, China is trading with Iran. We got numbers here, okay? That's all. That's the surface. But what we need to understand is the historical logic. And the very logic that we want to understand has to be situated into history. So it's not just a question of looking at a lens of political economy that we want to use, but it's a lens that forces us because it's important to do that, to situate historically these engagements. So we're looking at the material history, an understanding of history, of political economy, but the very concepts, the very things that we are labeling and defining in this process have to be situated into history. Now, Well, I'll stop here now. You go ahead.

Mamadou: Yeah, no, I was going to say, no, no, no. Thank you so much. Because oftentimes when we see these discussions online, right, it's quite asinine, juvenile, reactionary, fueled by emotion. Again, these are very sometimes human responses. But if we're going to have a serious conversation about situating China, and at the very least, those of us who wish to be scholars, academics, intellectuals, we have a duty to provide responses that are historically situated. And I'm also thinking about the ways in which, even when we want to critique China, right, what... one of the ways I think I've been taught by Radhika Desai, Marx's notion of critique is not just dismissal. It's explaining what the thing is, talking about what they achieved, and then what are the limitations? This is how you do a critique of something and also locate it. And also as our comrade Bikram Gill drawing on Hegel would, and Marx will tell us that let's not forget or confuse the parts for the whole. Oftentimes people speak of the part as if it's the whole or neglecting the whole altogether. So given that we should have this historically situated conversation or historically situated kind of location of China, how do we begin to understand China's relationship historically

Matteo Capasso: I think the very first move that we should do is undoubtedly to understand the integration, the configuration, the historical configuration, integration that the region has had in the global economy, in the world order under US-led unipolar control. And after that, we can move to understand what China has done, is doing, and the kind of history that instead its cooperation and its relationship with the region tells us. So Western countries have historically engaged with the Middle East through a logic of control and extraction. Right after World War II, with the so-called dismantlement of Western colonialism, we had the establishment of a unipolar order by the United States, with the United States at the helm, which replicated in different forms the colonial system. arrangements that had been sustaining Western accumulation and Western control and domination of the region. What changes under US imperialism is that the region now becomes integrated through three fundamental elements, which very quickly, and we can discuss this more later if we need to, are Israel, the Zionist entity, because it's a military formation, completely supported and financed and sustained by the United States, which intervenes militarily to undermine any project of sovereign development in the Arab-Iranian region. At any point, this social political formation attempts to emerge. So whether we have Syria, whether we have Lebanon, whether it's Iraq, Iran, there is always a war with Israel. Second, there is oil. Oil is fundamental in this triangle because it's going to be the element by the 1970s that is going to allow the supremacy, the dollar seigneurage. Basically, it allows the U.S. to make sure that the dollar becomes the most used currency currency in the world. And each and every country in the world need dollars because they have to buy oil. And so oil comes vis-a-vis the Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia. And finally, the third element is the installation of oil. comprador regimes, if you want, or to put it more simply, governments that do not serve the interest of the people, but the interest of the elites, of the ruling class, which is integrated to the global economy led by the United States and the Western powers. So all the assets in this region are valorized for the profit and for the extraction of value that goes outside of the region and towards foreign countries. This is very important to understand. Why? Because China's engagement does not emerge from this. So already, and this is something very, very important to understand, but very simple. That's what I mean. Very, very simple. But it's immediately forgotten in every kind of discussion, whether it's social media, whether it's people feeling, how do you say, frustrated, even rightly so, about the current situation in the region, whether it's Gaza or Lebanon and all the deaths that is coming.

Mamadou: Or Chinese Zionism, for example.

Matteo Capasso: Yes. And yes, even going as far as calling China Zionist. This is a problem because, you know, the moment we label or we rush to make this kind of conclusions, we tend to forget history. And historically, China's relationship with the region, of course, is not new, though its material weight is, and we will discuss more. But the proper starting point of China's relationship with the Middle East in the modern era and the contemporary era, I want to discuss because, of course, we can go back to the Silk Road, you know, and that would need an entirely different approach to this. But the proper starting point, I think, is the Bandung moment of 1955. because this was not a Chinese initiative, but it established a political framework within which China understood its relationship to the decolonizing world. The five principles of peaceful coexistence, sovereign equality, non-interference, these were not invented for diplomatic convenience. They emerged from China's own experience of imperial humiliation, the Opium Wars, the treaty port system, the century in which Chinese sovereignty was systematically violated by the same powers that were simultaneously dismembering, dividing up the Arab world. And so you have this shared historical experience of subjugation, which is not a rhetorical talking point. We're talking about material conditions that these two different regions of the world were sharing. So there is a political foundation that shapes how China approaches the question of sovereignty in ways that This transactional analysis or a realist analysis cannot capture and does not want to capture because, as I said earlier, it remains on the surface. It looks at the numbers. What are the numbers now? Then let's do the analysis out of these numbers. But it forgets history. And so what looks like the number eight now, it can't be just a number eight because it has to be story-sized. How did we reach to be number eight? as you were saying before, mentioning Radica and Bikram, you know, the part and the whole. And this is the same thing with history. We cannot pick and choose. We have to see how this developed across history. So that the value itself that we've seen the surface now as an historical frame, as an historical condition that allowed this value to emerge in the first place. Now, for example, if you take Palestine, China recognized the PLO in 1965 before most Western states had even acknowledged the Palestinian question as a political issue. This is an historical lineage that matters. But at the same time, what is genuinely new today is the material weight of China, which was not there back in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. Now there is a capacity to act on these very principles that were identified at Bandung, but at a different scale. China is now the top trade partner for most regional states, including the Gulf. The Belt and Road Initiative has signed agreements with almost every country in the region. And China has reached the point where it's able to create favorable conditions for potential rapprochement and diplomatic talks. Think about what happened in 2023 with Saudi Arabia and Iran, when the Palestinian factions were brought to Beijing. These are not actions of a simply peripheral actor of the world, but we are seeing as a gradual convergence of a long-standing political orientation and the newly acquired material capacity to act on this. Now, our analytical challenge is to hold both dimensions together, to understand how one shaped the other and how one is changing the other as well at the present moment. But of course, this is something that requires us to sit and talk and to analyze and to have knowledge of things rather than just make sound bites.

Mamadou: Exactly. And I think that's so important because once again, without this history, we fall into this kind of positivistic understandings and look at the data today. And it's easy to say, again, the headline will say, but China trades with Israel, right? Not looking into that. Okay. In what sector are they trading, for example? Has that trading decreased over some time? What's the historical relationship between these countries and how do we get to the point in which we are today? And that's why people always hear me talk on the show, on my social media, about taking a dialectical approach to understanding, right? To understanding change and movement. And I think that's very important. So I think my next question, and some of these questions are going to be a bit polemical because I want to respond to what I see as some of the most common charges. against China. So let's talk about this one. So you went into a little bit about it, but let's talk about some specifics. How does China's model of trade, investment and infrastructure differ from Western intervention? And then question is, is China exporting a development model or simply securing supply chains?

Matteo Capasso: Yeah, that's a good question. So China is Where can I start? Let's say that before getting to the model, let's start with the material reality. China imports approximately 40 to 45% of its soil from the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, UAE. So energy is certainly foundational to China's industrial capacity. and the social contract on which the Chinese state operates. But energy is also, as you say, is not one interest among many, because energy dependency explains the volume of engagement, but not its form. And the form is what matters the most. Because China, OK, takes oil, but what brings in, in terms of technology, of goods, shows that there is an exchange. And this is important for us to understand because we're looking at two models of regional integration that are operating at the same time. And the distinction between them is the most important thing to understand. about China's presence in the region. Let's go back to the U.S. model. This U.S. model, we said, integrates the region to a logic of valorization, which in the literature is called the law of value, for external benefit, okay? To put it simply, this asset is, I value your asset because I can benefit and extract from it. Your people is not going to benefit from it. but it's good for me to extract it. So you try to basically produce what's beneficial for me outside because I will pay this lavishly and I will protect you and so on. So that's the arrangement of imperialism, okay? And this is the law of value. Now, as we know, oil revenues... The petrodollar system is created the moment in which oil revenues are recycled into the US Treasury bonds. This was an arrangement, and into the purchase of weapons, of course, of US military weapons. This was an arrangement established in the 1970s, formalized through agreements with Saudi Arabia, in which Gulf states committed to invoicing oil in dollars and recycling surpluses into US financial markets in exchange for security guarantees. get the revenues from the oil sold in dollars, then I'm going to buy your own securities, and you give me back actually physical security, military bases, weapons, and so on. So this is the structural code. The Pretodrola regime is what connects Gulf oil companies revenues to the dollar hegemony that we were talking about before. And it is what makes the military presence in the Gulf a financial necessity for the United States. Because by 1970s, the US was not energy dependent. The U.S. now is energy independent. It doesn't need oil per se, the commodity. What it needs is the control over this flow. Because the control over the flow keeps the dollar afloat, the senorage afloat. Now, the region is tightly integrated into this. There is a center of gravity there, okay? And wealth is generated in the region, but it exits the region because that's the configuration, the integration that we are witnessing, that we are describing. What is interesting that is happening now, though, and this is where we have to see how that very triangle I described earlier is changing. The system is structurally eroding in the last two decades. It's not a dramatic rupture of the petrodollar system, but there is a quiet redirection of these flows, of these trade flows. Because all of a sudden, when you look at the numbers, there is some very good work by Salam al-Sharif, friend and academic as well, and colleague. which shows how China has overtaken the United States as the largest destination for the recycling of Gulf oil revenues through the trade channel. Because there is so much trade between the Gulf and China that more money is being spent by the Gulf towards China than the United States. That's one. So the GCC states are spending more money are redirecting more of their money towards China because of trade, and they're also selling more oil to China than to any other buyer. And their revenues are cycling back through trade with Chinese partners rather than US Treasury bonds. So the very first pillar of the petrodollar, the recycling mechanism, has been weakened by this structural shift. It is not possible to say that it's significantly weakened, but it's certainly there has been a weakening of this pillar. And it's very important. The second pillar, the dollar invoicing, which is different by the recycling mechanism. The dollar invoicing is about selling oil contracts in currencies different by the dollar. This one is being contested through the development of petroyuan contracts and renminbi settlement mechanism. At the same time, this remains a dominant arrangement up to now. In 2024, what's very important for us to understand, though, is that Saudi Arabia did not formally renew its 1974 commitment to price oil exclusively in dollars. This is a quiet but historically significant shift as well that we're witnessing. So what the Chinese model does is integrating the expansion of productive capacity internally towards the outside. The Belt and Road Initiative is not a development aid program or not even a debt trap. I'm not going into that because this is propaganda. It is an infrastructure of economic integration where you have the construction of ports, railways, energy corridor, industrial zones that build interdependence on the basis of mutual exchange. So interaction of mutual interaction. The logic is China needs partners with productive capacity or is looking for partners with productive capacities with whom they can exchange something, not dependent client states. China does not come and give you technology only if you give them military bases. and does not even want to project that kind of image or power abroad. He doesn't want to take on the security, the national security of Saudi Arabia. It is important. Let me take a case that maybe we're going to touch about later. The Omani case, okay? There is an interesting article by Linda Matar in Middle East Critique, where she shows that China invested substantially in the Dokom industrial port in Oman as a mean to diversify Omani society beyond oil dependency. So it was providing infrastructure with the aim to diversify the Omani economy, because that's what Omani was trying to do. What's the response of the US to that? The US responded by expanding its military presence near the Strait of Hormuz and actively discouraging the partnership. which ended up not fulfilling them, not being fulfilled, because there were, of course, there was opposition and veto, whatever you want to call it, threats by the United States. And we've seen this over and over in many different places of the world. China is bringing infrastructure, but China, I think, was building a pipeline in Benin, and at that point, the United States intervened through the comprador class of another African government that does not allow this project to continue. The same thing was even with a country like Italy, which was one of the first European countries to sign into the Belt and Road in 2019. Then there is a change of government with the right wing and the fascists coming to power. And the first thing that they do is they go to China and say, oh, we are not doing this. There is no mutual exchange. We are not benefiting. China is like, OK, you're not benefiting because you're not producing anything anymore. So, I mean, if you want, we open up your market. It's a fifth of humanity. But try to bring us something of value. They don't have it. So they use this excuse to come out of the Belt and Road Initiative. But why is this happening? Because, of course, there were pressures and there was alignment with the U.S. government. So then there is another dimension of this. And I think this is something that is hardly talked about in Western commentary. And I think it is important, which is the question of knowledge and civilization. The US model, as an editor of a journal focusing on the Middle East and as a scholar, somebody who's focused on area studies for long, the US model of knowledge production brought to the region always framework that think of clash, of conflict, as the ultimate form in which the West looks at the region. So there is always the construction of difference from a cultural point of view, but this construction of difference is required because it's based on a paradigm that says, look, you are inferior, we are superior. So you either take, jump on the train of democracy or otherwise there is a cultural pathology that requires external discipline. We're going back to the clash of civilization. By the way, I cannot go into this, but there is a fabulous essay by Bernard Lewis. It's very Orientalist, whatever, but everybody should read, which is the question of Islam and communism together. where he literally describes the dangers of Islam potentially aligning with communism. This was written back in the, I think it was in the 60s or the 70s, but it's a beautiful essay because it really shows the fears that the United States had, that imperialism had, in potentially seeing these two different projects coming together. So... I was talking about this dimension that doesn't receive enough attention because it brings about a very different epistemological orientation, not just in the way knowledge is produced, but also in the ways these projects that we discuss when it comes to China about the Silk Road, about the The Belt and Road Initiative. These are historical metaphors. They're not empty rhetoric. We're talking about centuries of knowledge and goods and people moving in multiple directions between China, Central Asia, what used to be called Persia, and the Arab world. And I can see firsthand, by being here in the People's Republic, how the universities themselves are investing seriously in this type of civilizational studies and exchange with the region. which is not intelligence gathering dressed up as scholarship. Think about the Kurds of the woman that was found working as an asset in Iraq and then eventually released, who presents herself as an analyst, the Israeli one. And then, but they are literally, what China is trying to produce is a different way of positioning yourself in relation to another civilization. There is this idea of mutual interaction. We want to interact on an equal basis. This is not naive. Again, as I said, it's not just rhetoric. Because when you look at the way they're formulating it, they're not talking about civilization as something that cannot take the form of conflict. It can take the form of conflict, but that shouldn't be the only outcome or the end goal, the zero-sum game that Western knowledge production and Western policies have constantly produced. I mean, ultimately, this formulation that is coming out of Chinese academia, which connects to the Civilizational Exchange Initiative of President Xi Jinping, has so much to do with the way Mao Zedong was talking about contradictions in his famous essays, on contradictions. He talks about contradictions as taking different forms and shapes, but not necessarily having to be constantly antagonistic. There are always going to be contradictions in society, but we can resolve them through different means, not necessarily with violence. What the West is showing is that we cannot accept contradictions. You need to jump on our train. You require our external force and discipline. And finally, I think there is another important element that is important for us, which I think I've talked about briefly already, which is... The military question, the way in which the US has integrated the Arab world in its own orbit, in its own world order that they strive to create, which Radica says it's always failed to maintain domination. And partly that's true. It never reached the point that it could completely control the region as it wanted, or even the entire globe, there was always resistance and pushing back. But I think this is, if you follow the train of thoughts that I was developing, we have to also look at the contradictions that emerge out of this. US model, integration through domination and subordination. Chinese model, productive capacity, civilizational exchange. and the shift of the very Gulf economy towards China. So the very Gulf is part and parcel of this historical change that we are seeing towards the global south, of which China is a significant part of it. At the same time, the Gulf is also where the security architecture is purely American. So when we think of the war happening in Iran, all these contradictions are exploding in our face, live, because you see that the very money that the Gulf now is redirecting towards the east is part of this major historical shift taking place. At the same time, the military bases used to bomb Iran, they are also part of this historical shift, of this conflict that is taking place. where you have the Western-led order trying to reimpose the condition of control, yet from the very places that are already actively contributing to the shift that they want to prevent. And this is part of, this is understanding history. It's not about being a spectator or supporting one side or the other, but it's really trying to understand the dynamics at play with all its own contradictions that are exploding, even more so because of the wars that the U.S. is launching more and more.

Mamadou: Thank you so much. And I think that is a important segue into current events as it pertains to the US Zionist entity war of aggression on the Islamic Republic. So I think where I want to take this discussion is the veto because the Bahraini-led security resolution was somewhat as a shock to people. Myself, I was not shocked personally, but people were like, oh my God, China finally did something. That was the kind of stuff we were hearing, right? China finally has done something. Oh, so Ben, again, how do we understand this veto? How do we understand China's understanding of non-interference with this veto? Because people will then say, but why didn't they veto the Board of Peace resolution, for example? So people are saying, oh, this is contradictory. How do we begin to understand this? And then China is doing this because they're quote unquote self-interested. And then again, how do we weigh all of these contradictory claims and understandings with what do we understand China's support for Iran in this moment? We know that there's a military and strategic partnership between Iran, Russia, and China. So yeah, sorry, I'm bringing that all together, but I know you're someone as a dialectician can bring all that together for us.

Matteo Capasso: I'll try. I'll try my best. Let's start from the non-interference. Let's start from there. So non-interference for China is both a position and a strategic posture. And it needs to be both to be durable in time. So these are not contradictory, okay? The principle and the strategy reinforce each other. So the principled position of non-interference is rooted, as we were saying, in China's own historical experience. It's a structural rejection of the logic that powerful states have the right to reorganize the internal affair of weaker ones. And that position has been consistent across seven decades. I call that position anti-hegemonism. I don't call it anti-imperialism because we are not living at the time of the 1960s and 50s. It's anti-hegemonism. It's anti-unipolarity. That's what it is. In this historical moment, that's how I define it. Of course, it builds on the logic of anti-imperialism, but it's not anti-imperialism right now. Because when we think of anti-imperialism, we think of weapons, we think of people fighting. China is not in that position anymore. It's a structural rejection of that logic of unipolarity. Now, the strategic logic to this, so we have the principal position and the strategic logic, is that China engages with a wide range of states across the region. As we were saying, states with very different political systems, ideological orientation, and relationship to the existing order. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey or Egypt, and Israel. The principle of non-interference allows China to maintain productive relationship across this division without forcing itself or the others into alignment choice that would cost for either side axis. And this is not cynicism. It's a recognition that in a region, as at war, as in a state of violence, imposed by the very integration that we discussed before by imperialism, there is an insistence on ideological conformity as a condition of engagement, so that there is Basically, the problem that the US has made for itself, China does not want to create. Now, it is important. I have to go back and compare to history because otherwise it seems that we don't get to understand because this is, again, the importance of locating this in history. U.S. engagement has been consistently produced what? Regime change, sanctions, occupation, deliberate destruction of state capacity, of knowledge production, of literally the modes of social reproduction of the social formations. Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria. Now Iran, Gaza, Palestine. You know, these are not political failures. They didn't know what to do the day after. They were predictable outcomes of a model, a model that requires destruction and not development. It has to extract. I'm going to destroy your sovereign capacity because you are a potential challenger. Because the moment you build your capacities, you create a demonstration effect that tells to the other people in the region, oh, wow, he made it. They are making it. Maybe we should do this as well. You cannot allow that. You have to destroy it. Now, this is important for us because the moment China operates within this framework and in this region and in the way it's integrated, it tries to proceed according to a principle of anti-hegemonism and a strategy that aligns to this. Now, let's move to the specific case of Palestine and for that reason, Israel. Again, we have to start from the... not from the moral dimension, which again, even the moral dimension has to be historicized. And I'm not saying that morality is unimportant. It is urgent and real. But without the structural analysis, the moral position itself has no explanatory power. That does not mean that, as I am going to say, there are also limits or there are questions that are opening up to China in light of the violence exploding in the region. But that doesn't mean that China is the one creating it or the one that is supposed to, you know, to alleviate or to take the region out of this very violence in which it has been integrated. Now, Israel, okay? And of course, when I talk about Israel, I talk about Palestine. Israel, as we know, performs three specific structural functions in the U.S. architecture of the region. It is the regional enforcer, as we said before, military instrument, basically a military base that destroys, that attacks states every time when they try to break out of the comprador arrangement. It is a laboratory for weapons and surveillance technologies that circulate back not just into the Western military-industrial complex, but also in other countries of the Global South. And finally, it is the ideological spearhead, linchpin of a domestic coalition inside the United States, that sees the military-industrial complex aligning with the Zionists, the evangelical Christians, and so on. And that has organized U.S. domestic policy around that Zionist project for decades. This is why the US, whether Republican or Democratic, have defended Israel regardless of what it does and regardless of the diplomatic costs. It's not about sentiment. This is literal, structural, economic, material interest at play, which is changing partly as well that too, but now let's move it. We can go back to the internal contradiction of the United States vis-a-vis Israel later. Now, China has recognized Israel only after the PLO, to which it granted early recognition, as I said before, in 1965, only after the PLO decided to accept the two-state solution. So we're talking about the start of the Oslo process in the 1990s, okay? At the same time, China has been consistent in supporting what the very PLO had supported back in the days, which has been support for a two-state solution, right of return, and alignment with states of the Global South at the International Court of Justice, especially after the Israeli-Zionist genocide in Gaza. This is very important because we are seeing that China has operated on a principle of sovereignty where it does not impose its own decision on others, but tries to go along to acknowledge the sovereign parties at play in their political position. Now, there are also contradictions in this. Why? China has not accommodated Israel. This is the wrong frame. I mean, the people are as willing to go, as you were saying before, about Chinese Zionism. Because maintaining economic relationship does not validate the Zionist project. This is where I go back to the numbers and the historical project that China has brought forward. But the contradiction exists. And China's structural weight, in a way, we can say, has not been translated into the diplomatic offensive, if you want, that its position could support. We can say that, okay? It's okay to say that. But one thing is to say that perhaps China, considering the material capacity that it has, could exercise a bigger diplomatic offensive vis-à-vis Palestine. At the same time, when you look at the entire hegemonic principle position and strategy of China, we have seen over and over that China has never gone for slogan and major declarations if it's not able to act on these principles. And now we take the two UN votes that are instructive, you know, are instructive in a way of what seems, because they are contradictory, if one takes them together. So in April 26, so this month, China vetoed the resolution on the Strait of Hormuz proposed by Bahrain and the Gulf countries. Now, the initial text said that Bahrain wanted all necessary means to be used to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Just the idea of it, by the way, when we stop for a second without analysis, makes us realize what kind of world we live in. Anyway, the text had been progressively watered down in the sense that the language had been changed, but China still vetoed on the grounds that it framed Iran as the sole destabilizing force, while saying nothing about U.S.-Israeli aggression that produced Iran's response in the first place. It seems so far that this is all good. Let me go back to that later. Compare this to November 2025. I think it was Resolution 2803, because I went and looked it up again, about transport of peace for Gaza. which passed with China and Russia abstaining. We all know this is a plan that has not been put into place yet, but it aims to erase Palestinian self-determination. Trump is put as a broker. It conditions Palestinians' governance on agreements among foreign powers, and it explicitly contradicts the ICJ advisory opinion. So China didn't veto this. Why? The variable here, what needs to be understood, is not the content of the resolution. By any measure, the Board of Peace was way more fundamentally colonial than the Ormus text and any means necessary. The variable is the regional endorsement. And this is where we go back to how we understand the multipolar moment or the historical shifts and the political choices that have to be made to change the world. And how we decide to look at China, as I opened at the very beginning by saying, either as a salvation actor or as one of the many actors within this historical moment that is required to make political choices to decide what's going to come next after this very violent transformation and crisis of the US-led unipolar moment, the order. Why? Because the regional endorsement was very important for China. Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, all issued a joint statement of support to the board of peace. Even Algeria supported it. Even Algeria supported it. But what is the key here? China vetoes the resolution on the Ormus text because there is a sovereign country, Iran, who opposes it and also is framed as the sole destabilizing force producing the very crisis that the Israeli and the US, with their aggression, created in the first place. In the case of the Board of Peace, there is one actor that China recognizes as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian that supports this very resolution. And that is the Palestinian Authority. Now, this is important. You know why? Because there is something structurally precise about China's anti-hegemonism that needs to be understood. When the target sovereign state itself explicitly resists, as Iran did on Hormuz, then China supports it. But it retreats to abstention when the U.S. has secured sufficient regional endorsement through its comprador network to construct what you can call an appearance of consent. But that's what China does. The logic is internally consistent, if you want, with the non-interference principle. You do not veto something that the recognized authorities of the affected parties have endorsed. But for Palestine, and this is where the contradiction now we are going to touch on the fire in a way. For Palestine, sovereignty and sovereign representation is fragmented. The PA and the resistance are not the same political subject. So what happens is that The Palestinian resistance, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the fighting forces in Gaza, rejected Resolution 2803. China followed Ramallah, you can say, but it didn't follow Gaza. So at the same time, this is where we need history. China is the same actor. who created the conditions for the Palestinian factions to unite right after October 7th, right after the Al-Aqsa flood. So we need to be analytically honest. And as much as we want to look and pinpoint at China for not having pushed or rocked the boat on Trump's plan, we also have to look at the movement for Palestinian national liberation and the contradictions inside that are not being resolved. And finally, this is where I go back to the, you know, I bring back the circle back to the start. There is no external power who's going to save neither Palestine or the region for that matter. Because I think that most of this... sound bites, tweets, which also affect our ways to think and to analyze things dialectically, which means in all directions as well, you know, not just trying to create a narrative saying China is doing everything that it can. China is operating according to a principle of entire hegemonism, for which it has recognized the Palestinian Authority as the representative of the Palestinian people, And it's not going to be the one rocking the boat, but it has created the condition, potentially, for the very Palestinian factions to unite themselves. It happened for a couple of days, and then it was this very, you know, the Palestinian Authority, of course, broke the agreement by starting to shooting people in Nablus, belonging to the resistance, to the Islamic Jihad. I think it was back in 2024. So, this is what we're looking at. We're looking at... at a country that maintains its relationship on the basis of sovereignty, but it also proceeds without the principle of non-interference. So I recognize you as sovereign, but I'm not going to tell you what you have to do.

Mamadou: And these are questions that most people... That would be re-inscribing the logic of US imperialism, which for me, I don't understand how people don't see this. People talk about, okay, but China needs to put their weight behind certain things. And I understand that. But again, when you begin to locate that in this principle of non-interference, Do we want China? You know, it's quite funny, right? Because it's a side topic. We hear all the time, people say online, but China is colonizing Africa. And I think to myself, but the loan programs are not coming with the same conditions that you don't have to liberalize your economy. You don't have to gut your social services in order to get loans from China like you do in the IMF, et cetera. So I don't understand what people want. People want China to operate on the same logic as US imperialism.

Matteo Capasso: Exactly. But also, and this is where China is opening the space. I call this a space of autonomy. Why? Even when you're talking about what's happening in Africa or in Latin America, China comes with a loan. China comes with a project, comes with an opportunity. but is operating with ruling classes that in the first place are used and are comfortable to engage themselves at the international level, at the level of global economy, as they did with the United States for so long. So you want China to bring infrastructure, change your government, and potentially dictate how the country needs to be run. It's madness. But it's precisely the mentality of salvation, saviorism, that much of the left, even of the people who are, how do you say, morally, that they are seeing the violence and they want somebody to do something. I think that putting their restfulness or their disappointment towards what humanity has done in every single place, it's not the most strategically useful reaction. It is certainly true that in the face of 80,000 people who have been massacred and 60,000 of them being children, humanity has failed, okay? But we also have to look at the conditions, the historical conditions of the region that have allowed this to take place in the very first place. And they are comfortable to pipe food and oil to Israel while the very Israeli soldiers are relentlessly pounding Gaza. How do we expect China to have come in the region and liberate Gaza? This is an Hollywood movie. This is not reality. One. And two, and I know you had countless discussion, you know, podcast on this, probably even with me. As we said before, when we look at the crisis of the unipolar moment and the rise of what now is called multipolarity, which is, you know, this rise of sovereign development by different states of the global south. It's a dialectical process. In the sense that it's not just China rising or Russia intervening in Ukraine that leads us to multipolarity. Of course, that is part of the process. It is part of a coalition of a number of social formations that decide to confront the West or are able to develop in a way that modernization does not mean westernization anymore. they can find their sovereign development. That's the case of China, that because of its scale and geography, of course, puts as a structural and material weight to this transformation that is bigger than other countries. But this happens also when Russia intervenes in Ukraine and says no to the NATO expansion going east. But at the same time, what I was trying to say is that you see this alternative formation, BRICS, you see China, you see Russia, and so on and so forth. But the crisis or the opportunity created by these formations is also the result of that dance of dialectics in which we should locate the internal explosion of the capitalist model. This is part and parcel of the historical process that we're witnessing. So it's not simply China rises, the Western model collapses. No, it's the internal contradictions of the very Western model that degenerate and are heightened even more by the fact that sociopolitical formations outside of the Western orbit have taken up these opportunities and created development away from westernization. So this is the dialectical play. And it's the same thing when you apply sanctions. Because when you apply sanctions over a country, you generate a class internally that benefits slowly from the, it's paradoxical, but benefits from these sanctions. Or starts to control the economy and ideologically starts to tilt towards the West. And that set of internal contradictions then becomes the ground for further hybrid warfare inside the country. So this is the dance of dialectics that we need to see constantly. It's not just China rising, the West declining. It's the internal contradictions of the capitalist model that has polarized wealth in society, has been destroying countries in the global South over and over, that has generated the conditions for alternative models to rise. And some of them, they have taken up to the extent, like China, that now are able to exercise a material weight that really puts imperialism in a condition of radical crisis. I think that the China-Iran relationship is one of the most... important and consequential bilateral relationship in this emerging multipolar order, but also one that is often misrepresented, okay? And I think it's misrepresented in two directions. I'll tell you why. Because Western commentary overstates the threats and understates its contradictions. So for Western commentary, China-Iran, very close relationship, everything is happening, it needs to be broken and so on. Now, on the other hand, I fear that some sections of the left overstates its debt and understates its limits. And I'll tell you why I think so. What we know and is documented is that there was a 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership signed in 2021, which established a framework cooperation across energy, infrastructure, transport, and security. There is no doubt that China remains the primary buyer of Iranian oil under sanctions. Actually, China stocked up oil during the month of January and February, and I think December as well, because they knew something might have happened.

Mamadou: This is a footnote.

Matteo Capasso: Now, the volumes are significant. We don't know the precise figures because they are contested and because much of the trade is structured to avoid what? U.S. secondary sanctions. At the United States, China has consistently blocked the resolution targeting Iranian sovereignty and used its veto in the Security Council to prevent being weaponized against Iran. But we also have to remind ourselves that the partnership has materially under-delivered when compared or when considered relative to its headline ambitions. Chinese companies have been incredibly cautious about exposing themselves to secondary sanctions. Many projects have moved slowly or stalled. And understanding this requires us to go beyond the diplomatic exchange, but again, look at the material reality, which has characterized Iran as well, and partly China, because again, we have to look at the operation taking place. So we said there is consistent, you know, like trade provided, how do you say, overcoming of sanctions by China by trading and buying Iranian oil. That's for sure. We know that it's happening. At the same time, we should not forget that part of the, how do you call it, materially under the... under-delivered projects or materially... I was saying that projects between China and Iran have also moved slowly. So there is consistent support of China with Iran when it comes to oil that has allowed to overcome significantly because of the volume of these transactions. the US sanctions over Iran. At the same time, I feel that there is an overestimation of how much this relationship goes. I don't want to talk about the military one because this is something that history will tell us. And maybe we will be told that actually there is more happening. But at this stage, it's entering a terrain of speculation rather than what we at least observe factually right now. And part of the answer, as I was saying, of this under-deliverance of projects between China and Iran lies also with Iran itself, specifically in the existence of a bloc, a class formation, whose interest for many years pulled in different directions from sovereign development. You can call it neoliberal bloc. You can call it the reformist. But we have to be also very honest in our analysis. The existence and sections of the bazaar merchant class, the technocratic elite that negotiated the JCPOA, the non-nuclear proliferation agreement with the United States. The JCPOA, yes. Significant parts of the private sector in Iran were pursuing a goal which was Western reintegration, not deeper partnership with Beijing. And observing this from the Chinese perspective, this was not a developmental... The China option did not represent a developmental path, but a foreclosure of Western access they had been working toward. So this is important because it is connected to what? To the very sanctions regime I was talking about earlier. The sanctions regime was designed precisely to cultivate these elements and strengthen this internal formation, which would then be much more amenable to make Western reintegration, to pursue Western reintegration. And Iran has been under sanction for so many years. So the existence of this very class and bloc was also part of the reason why, again, and then we go back to the same question we were talking about Palestine before, the internal divisions that did not allow fully a smooth integration with China. And there is a parallel here. And you know what is the parallel? The parallel is at the level of the resistance axis. Hamas' relationship with Iran and the axis as a whole has been oscillating for a long time. And this is a genuine reflection on political contradictions that we must be aware. Hamas left Damascus in 2012, sided with the opposition to the Syrian Arab Republic, and even provided rhetorical support for Saudi Arabia's war against the Houthis. This was the political branch sitting in Qatar, mostly. This changed when SINWAR came to lead Hamas in Gaza in 2017 and slowly began their integration process. It was only in 2022 that the Joint Operations Center in Beirut had been confirmed and Hamas had restored ties with Syria in October of that year. A month later, a year later, we have Tawafan Al-Aqsa. What I'm trying to say is that this history of contradictions cannot be overlooked. There are always internal contradictions that we must be able to understand, but not to undermine the very cause of liberation of humanity for which, as humans, as scholars, as students, as people, we want to pursue. But because we also have to be able to understand the reality, not simply as spectators, but in its totality. in how things shift and not simply by saying China is not doing this, Iran is not doing this. We need to have this capacity to understand materially the shifts of history and also the political contradictions and so on and so forth and how they can potentially undermine or be used and weaponized to undermine the project of liberation. It's a conscious reflection of those. The less we talk about them, the more we create a facade of reality that does not correspond to what it's actually on the ground. It's just what we achieve or we aspire to, which is important to have it as a goal. But we also need to be able to really understand reality because only by understanding reality, then we can set goals according to the ultimate dream that we have, objective, strategic objective, which is the human liberation.

Mamadou: Thank you so much. And I think this, I would, again, once this is out, I encourage people to tap into places like Middle East Critique, tap into Professor Mateo Capasso's work, tap into so many of these great anti-imperialist scholars in this moment, because again, And it's nice to have a hot... It's not even nice. I say nice in a sarcastic, ironic way. But you can have a hot take. You can have a reactionary take. But if we want to be serious thinkers, not for the sake of thinking, but for the sake of understanding, interpreting, and changing... the world yes we need to have these kinds of conversations that that bring to bear the full weight of history in our analysis and i think this is what i hope this conversation will serve as a stepping stone in that direction so thank you so much professor and i look forward to speaking to you again sometime take good care thank you mamadou