The Saudi-China Deal Tells Us What Autocracies Want From Each Other – By Patrick Tucker (Defense One) / Dec 16, 2022
Biden’s blunt democracy-vs.-autocracy rhetoric may be pushing U.S. security partners toward Beijing.
The new strategic-partnership agreement between China and Saudi Arabia illustrates how autocracies are finding common cause in resisting Western pressure on human rights, even if they sometimes find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict.
The agreement—between China, which is aligned with Russia, and Saudi Arabia, a bitter rival of Iran—was signed the same week that White House and Pentagon officials warned of growing military ties between Moscow and Tehran.
But Beijing and Riyadh’s mutual interest can be seen in the memorandum of understanding that will lead Chinese telecom giant Huawei to provide the Saudi Arabian government with cloud computing capabilities and other IT services. The United States has long warned that Huawei products could enable the Chinese government to steal information from their users. But the Saudi government has few other options for technology, which it uses to track dissent inside and outside of the country. It’s the sort of thing that Western technology companies try to avoid, out of fear of public backlash. China meanwhile sees Saudi Arabia as a potential source of funding and fuel.
But China wants more than IT purchase orders; it wants venture capital, said Greg Allen, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Governance Project and a senior fellow in the Strategic Technologies Program at CSIS.
