CHINA-MIDDLE EAST
China’s stepping up of research relations with countries in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in particular – has caught the eye of the United States which is putting pressure on some countries in the region to scale back research collaboration in potentially sensitive areas such as artificial intelligence (AI).
Research collaborations between China and several Middle Eastern countries has risen exponentially, especially in the last few years, with some experts saying research competition between the US and China has migrated to, and intensified within, the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, especially the Gulf states.
“The exponential increase in collaborations with China-based authors is in line with China’s steep rise in its overall scientific publications,” said Yusuf Ikbal Oldaç, assistant professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, who has researched China’s science collaborations with Muslim-majority countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Malaysia. However, his research does not include the United Arab Emirates, another area of focus for China’s research collaborations.
“The Chinese science system is moving up fast and gaining increasingly more space from the US science system. This situation does not deny that the US national science system is still strong, but it shows that the global balance is changing,” Oldaç told University World News.
While these countries continue to have research collaborations with the US, “globally, research is not as it was before, it’s now shaping new players. China has developed some of the most productive systems and databases for these things”, he said, referring to AI research, an area of priority for Beijing.
However, while scientists in China and the Gulf states have been collaborating for over a decade in energy research, including green energy, US attention has been drawn more recently to Chinese collaboration in AI with Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), amid concerns that they could enable the transfer of dual civilian-military use technologies to China.
The US has already banned the sale of high-end semiconductor chips to China and is concerned about such technologies reaching China through the ‘back door’, for example, through third countries, or research being shifted to third countries which receive Chinese researchers to work on collaborative projects that may not be possible in China itself because of restrictions imposed by the US.
Middle-East internationalisation
“It’s not that the Americans, to my knowledge, are concerned about some specific programme that the Gulf monarchies are engaging in, or that their educational institutions are trying to forge (with China), but they are concerned about the way that for example, KAUST, could be leveraged to further research programmes in Chinese universities that are frowned on (by the US), whether this is on the AI spectrum, or elsewhere,” said David B Roberts, referring to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia which, within the region, has among the largest number of research projects with China.
However, Roberts noted that China’s own research in areas such as AI is way ahead of these countries, which means the Middle East is unlikely to easily replace the US or European research collaborations for China itself. “I don’t see what unique attributes, skill sets, ideas, technologies, approaches, universities in the Middle East are going to add to Chinese research,” he said.
For some Middle Eastern universities research collaboration with China is part of a general internationalisation strategy. “They are looking to expand research collaborations wherever they can,” said Roberts.
“Gulf monarchies have been looking elsewhere to diversify their dependency (on the US) for 15 years and look for new collaborations, fewer strings, less encumbered collaborations, in case more ‘taps’ get turned off in the US,” he told University World News, referring to various types of US restrictions and sanctions.
“China wants to have a footprint everywhere they can, because they never know what’s going to lead to some kind of a breakthrough or opening up,” said Denis Simon, a US-based expert on China’s higher education and science, and former executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University near Shanghai.
Simon pointed to a global shift in research “in which countries that we perhaps hadn’t thought of, as participants in this high-tech world, all of a sudden, by virtue of the capital and the talent, have become players”.
China’s economic downturn could also be behind the emphasis on working with countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia that are investing hugely in technology and pouring funds into science.
“Whether or not those countries are going to be big in alternative energies, whether or not they’re going to be big and semiconductors, etcetera. clearly, the capital is there to invest,” noted Simon.
China’s approach in the Middle-East
Dr Jackie Armijo, who teaches at the American University of Afghanistan, Qatar and was previously an associate professor at Qatar University, told University World News: “China is creating many networks of people working together in almost all the major fields of science and they have done this in different ways over the past five to six years.”
According to Armijo, they have the potential to replace fractured research relations between China and countries in Europe, and possibly some research collaborations with the US. “And if not now, the groundwork is being built up,” said Armijo.
She added: “It’s not just about money. These countries (in the Middle East) also have serious interest in the same issues. China has the capacity to think 20 to 30 years down the line in terms of research.”
China’s approach in setting up research collaborations with international institutions has been quite focused, and designed to complement China’s own research aims, with targeting of research collaboration with Europe, Latin America, Asia or the Middle East, she noted.
For some years, “they (China) strategically identified the most important countries that are active in different BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) projects and what the BRI countries need in terms of development, in terms of science. They sent scholars to different countries to research and find out what the greatest need was,” Armijo said.
“Then they figured out which universities in China have the strongest experts in that field. They identify the scientists and scholars in the (targeted) country and send them to China on a short trip to set up connections with the Chinese scholars. They also offer PhDs and postdocs, specifically in those fields for people from those countries,” she explained.
This way research collaboration, which is top-down in China, as well as in the Middle East is centred on the priorities of China and the host country, rather than just the specific research interests of professors and their networks.
Oldaç concurred: “Policy level structures play an important role in establishing and prioritising research with certain regions. China is like that, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf regions are like that as well. They follow facilitation from their governments.”
Gulf countries are not short of money. However, they “need collaborations for talent and other things – the researchers they have are either young, or foreigners”, explained Oldaç.
What’s in it for the Middle East
Research collaboration has followed on China’s strengthened trade and economic ties with the UAE in recent years. For example, the UAE and China are collaborating to set up a space technology centre in Abu Dhabi to help Emirati students build skills in satellite and space telescope development.
The National Space Science and Technology Centre set up in 2021 at the UAE University is cooperating with Hong Kong University and Origin Space, a private Chinese company to design, develop and test satellites.
In November last year China added the Emirati institution University of Sharjah to its list of partners for the International Lunar Research Station moon base, with an MOU signed between China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory and the United Arab Emirates, to collaborate on science and technology experiments, data exchange and analysis, teaching and training, and developing space exploration capabilities.
However, it was UAE-China collaborations on AI that caught the eye of Washington DC. This led last year to the Abu-Dhabi based AI company G42 cutting ties with Chinese companies, which were seen by the US as a security threat, to ensure its access to US chips.
The New York Times reported that US officials were also concerned that G42 could provide a way for the Chinese government and companies to access genetic data of US citizens.
G42 has a range of AI projects, including in health, and is developing a large language model for use in generative AI, working with US partners such as Microsoft and OpenAI as well as Chinese technology companies. But the Abu Dhabi-based group, which relies on semiconductors made by US chipmaker Nvidia, has scrambled to allay fears that companies linked to the Chinese government could gain access to American AI systems.
American officials reportedly told their UAE counterparts that for sensitive emerging technologies, the Emirates must choose between its close ally the United States and China.
Saudi Arabia and China
In its concerns about ‘backdoor’ technology transfers to China, US attention has also turned to Saudi Arabia after Washington last August extended export licence requirements for GPUs made by US software company Nvidia and California-based semiconductor company AMD, to some parts of the Middle East. These exports to China are already prohibited.
“The US’ move is aimed at great power competition with China, in an attempt to slow down China’s development, and in doing so, it as a matter of fact restricts Saudi Arabia’s development as well,” Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, was quoted as saying by China’s official Global Times last October, after the US imposed restrictions.
Late last year KAUST in Saudi Arabia released AceGPT, an Arabic Large Language Model for powering generative AI bots, developed in collaboration with Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data.
The Financial Times last October reported concerns at KAUST that such collaborations could jeopardise chip exports from the US to power a new supercomputer at the university, currently being developed to roll out Arabic-language LLMs, and this has led to KAUST attempting to distance its sensitive projects from China.
“We’re sensitive to the sensitive areas — we have to be mindful of that,” Tony Chan, president of KAUST, who was previously president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said at a webinar titled ‘Higher Education and the changing global order’ organised by his institution in January.
Saudi Arabia “wants to have the best technology at the best cost to come to the Kingdom to help the country to develop, that really is its main objective,” noted Chan.
“Saudi Arabia has always had close collaboration with the US, and it continues to, for many, many reasons. China seems to be a new relationship, but in terms of trade, in terms of business, has existed for a long time,” Chan added.
According to Nature Index a significant portion of China’s research collaborations with Saudi Arabia is channelled through a single institution: KAUST which also has joint research projects with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), Soochow University, Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, the University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and others.
KAUST, mainly through some of these collaborations, receives funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and its 973 programme for basic research.
On its website KAUST says 20% of its students, 34% of postdoctoral researchers and 9% of faculty members are mainland Chinese.
However, KAUST also maintains strong research relations with the US. “Saudi Arabia seems to have a similar number of collaborations with the USA and China,” according to Oldaç but with Saudi-based scientists collaborating increasingly with scientists in China, he expects the difference will widen between its US and China collaborations in favour of China.
Saudi Arabia collaborates more with China in natural sciences, engineering, and technology and agricultural sciences, but more with the US in medical and health sciences, social sciences, and humanities, according to Oldaç’s research.
Expanded collaboration
Saudi Arabia’s science collaboration with China has expanded into diverse areas such as genetics and space exploration, drone technology, as well as AI, according to Mohammed Alsudairi of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies and Australian National University.
In a video commentary referring to a paper he co-authored last year for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on How Saudi Arabia Bent China to its technoscientific Ambitions Alsudairi said the goals of the two sides differ.
For China, it is part of presenting itself as a scientific powerhouse through these partnerships and may also be paving the way for Chinese technology companies seeking opportunities and profits by transferring technologies to countries like Saudi Arabia, which have the capital and purchasing power.
For Saudi Arabia, these partnerships help transfer the technologies it desires, including technologies it cannot acquire elsewhere due to export controls imposed by the US.
According to Simon: “The US and China are playing a big game on a global scale but these countries [that is, Saudi Arabia] want to play with both players and not get drawn into that [US-China rivalry] and as I understand it, the Saudis want their own terms on how they interact with the Chinese and also as much as they can with the Americans.”
For example, Saudi Arabia retains control of its own technologies, rather than signing agreements giving Chinese organisations the IP rights, as China has insisted on in the past with some other countries.
Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East are also ‘neutral’ territory for some academics. “A number of Chinese and Chinese Americans have decided to go and work in the Middle East at various universities, because they want to be able to deal with both China and the United States,” said Simon. “So far their experience has been positive,” he said.