ABSTRACT
The upsurge of the Arab Spring caught China by surprise. China's foreign policy operates in the Middle East under the premise that authoritarian Arab regimes are immutable, especially the dictatorial regimes in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. For this reason, violent revolutions in these countries came as a shock to China. They reminded the nation of the massive Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 and the subsequent violence. It took China an entire decade to recuperate from this internal haemorrhage, although the scars of the massacre will be permanently present in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. This chapter proposes to examine China's reaction to the Arab uprisings, to open a debate on China's lack of a systematic approach to deal with the revolutions and to inquire about China's lack of a coherent policy towards the Arab Spring.
