China’s Belt and Road to Damascus

There is, it seems, no regime too odious to be a partner of China. Being repressive and corrupt have long been useful assets for gaining the friendship of Beijing, but its recent embrace of the ‘Butcher of Damascus’, Bashar al-Assad, carries reputational and other risks for China – even when it doesn’t have much of a reputation to lose.

China has offered Syria membership of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and with it the promise of munificent investment in Syrian roads, railways, ports, telecoms, hotels and much more. The offer came this week from China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, who was the first high-profile guest in Damascus after Bashar al-Assad’s re-election as president. Assad claims to have won 95 per cent of the vote in a poll described by Britain and the EU as ‘neither free nor fair’.

For Assad, China’s largesse must seem like a perfect accompaniment to the Russian and Iranian guns and muscle that have kept him in power during a civil war that has claimed half a million lives.