The Limits on China’s Role in Syria
(with Nicholas Lyall and Logan Pauley) THE DIPLOMAT
Last week, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected with 95 percent of the vote. He has been keen to portray the poll as a sign that the country is returning to normality after a decade of chaos and civil war. That is important if he wants to attract outside investment in order to rebuild the country.
Certainly, since the last presidential election in 2014, Assad has regained control over much of the country and its population, as shown by the fact that the number of registered voters has risen from 15.8 to 18.1 million. However, parts of the country did not participate, including the Kurdish autonomous region in the north and the opposition-held province of Idlib.
Assad’s victory was treated skeptically in Western countries, where officials have shared the Syrian opposition’s view that the poll was neither free nor fair. By contrast, Assad’s Russian and Iranian allies have endorsed the result. They were followed by Belarus and China.
The Chinese endorsement will be especially welcome for Assad as he looks to leverage it into a more tangible form of assistance. Previously, he has played up the Sino-Syrian connection as a way to demonstrate that he is not diplomatically isolated and that he has a number of potential partners to support his reconstruction efforts.
