ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the economic ties between the six-state Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and China. Despite China's increasing energy imports, its dependence on the GCC region has been nearly constant for more than one and a half decades since the turn of the twenty-first century. The GCC-China relations have witnessed an inflection point since the mid-2010s, as the latter leapfrogged to become the GCC's largest exporter. The infrastructural and connectivity investments under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been more in the MENA region outside the GCC, but the ambit of the BRI has been expanded to include the energy and technology components in partnership with the GCC. The GCC-China relations are now gravitating toward board-based AI-enabled technological collaboration and in the process empowering the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the deployment of Chinese AI-enabled systems in the internet-intensive GCC societies confers a competitive advantage in terms of enhancing the performance and predictability of its surveillance systems. For the GCC, the partnership has no human rights strings attached to it. Both the GCC and China are poised to reap strategic dividends from the data-driven partnerships.
