ABSTRACT
China’s poverty and ideology could hardly be inspiring across the Muslim world at a time when Turkey fought alongside the USA in Korea. For the most part, the Middle East looms large in Chinese strategists’ minds nowadays only when its problems encroach on China’s primary ‘Security Ring’. Having drawn out the sediments of China’s contact with the region in olden times, this chapter focuses more closely on the twentieth century. Through much of the Republican era, China was weakened by internecine warlordism, civil strife, and Japanese encroachment. China and Turkey were quite often juxtaposed at the time as the ‘sick’ polities of Asia and Europe respectively, and the vernacular press in both countries agitated for modernization in the spirit of Meiji Japan. By the late 1930s, as calls for pan-Asian solidarity were spreading, the Republic of China tilted towards support of the Arab cause.
