On Thursday, he was taken to the palatial royal court, where his car, a luxury Chinese sedan, was escorted by horse riders carrying Saudi and Chinese flags. Prince Mohammed greeted him with a warm handshake, contrasting with Mr. Biden’s greeting of a fist bump.
The crown prince’s moves to deepen relationships with countries like China, Russia and South Korea are partly driven by his desire to establish Saudi Arabia a power in its own right, rather than an expectation that any of them could replace the United States. In that context, the pomp and circumstance around Mr. Xi’s visit is as much a signal to his domestic and regional audiences as it is to the United States. Many officials in the Gulf are preparing for what they believe is an emerging multipolar world, in which the United States no longer plays as central a role as it has since World War II.
“The American hegemony today over the international order won’t continue, in my estimation,” Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the president of the neighboring United Arab Emirates, said at a public lecture earlier this year. “China has become a central economic player, a central technological player, a very important political actor.”
Prince Mohammed wants to diversify the oil-dependent kingdom’s economy, develop a civilian nuclear program and build a robust local defense industry. Securing technology and know-how from China is key to those goals, and Saudi pundits often compare the kingdom’s economic transformation to China’s decades ago.
ٍSaudi and Chinese companies signed 34 agreements on Wednesday in fields including information technology, genetics, mining, hydrogen energy and manufacturing. One Saudi firm partnered with a Chinese company to set up an electric vehicle plant in the kingdom.
Huawei, the telecommunications conglomerate targeted by American sanctions, signed a memorandum of understanding with a Saudi government ministry, partly to enable Huawei to build a data center in the kingdom.
